The aim of this contribution is twofold: first, to verify empirically how and to what extent party organizations vary within countries, in time; second, to enhance the role of political factors in explaining organizational variance. While mainstream literature has generally overestimated cross-national party convergence, a renewed interest in the study of variance has recently gained ground. We thus focus on seven European countries, from 1990 to 2010, by combining party organizational data from the Party Organization Data Handbook and the Political Party Database Project, with domestic cultural, socioeconomic, technological data from the European Values Survey and the World Bank, as well as supranational economic data provided by the OECD. We are interested in verifying how much of the variance in party organizations can be explained by resorting to the parameters of the party systems vis-à-vis domestic and supranational extra-political factors. Our results show that the explanatory power of party systems’ parameters is stronger than the predictive ability of contextual variables.

The use of the Internet and communication technologies has dramatically increased in recent times. This change has affected every aspect of political life, with electoral campaigns and parties making no exception. One of the most significant advancements on the theme is the spread of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). These tools are developed before elections to match users’ policy preferences to those of the parties running. By looking at the dataset created with the answers of the users of an Italian VAA, Navigatore Elettorale, this study aims at understanding the representativeness of the six main parties running in the 2018 General Election. Through the development of a Representative Deficit Index, the study will also assess the key policy areas in which each of these parties performed best in the eyes of the electorate. The finding shows a diversified pattern of (in)successes for each of the parties, with some unexpected results.

No abstract