This special issue offers an up-to-date overview of the democratization of candidate selection, while giving attention to causes and cases from both past and present. The focus is on the consequences of internal democratization for the overall functioning of political parties. The contributions show that there are many forms of democratizing candidate selection. These differences mainly concern the inclusiveness of the selectorate that controls the candidate selection process and the degree of centralization of the selection methods, of which the role and composition of the selectorate are the most vital and defining criteria. The types of consequences and their impact on the functioning of parties are not univocal because there are different degrees of democratization. The empirical evidence presented by the contributions shows that moderate forms of democratization can have beneficial effects on party organizations-such as higher levels of membership participation-but that this effect is not certain. Radical forms, on the other hand, are more likely to distort party cohesiveness, and consequently weaken the quality of representative democracy.

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This special issue of Sociological Methods & Research presents four in-depth methodological discussions of the use of fuzzy sets in social research. They have in common that they confront and compare fuzzy set methods with mainstream techniques. These contributions should not be read as introductions to fuzzy set analysis (see Smithson 1987;Ragin 2000) but as attempts to validate this new methodology and demonstrate some of its strengths by comparing it with established approaches.In brief, fuzzy sets extend Boolean or "crisp" sets by permitting membership scores in the interval between 0 and 1. With crisp sets, cases are perceived only as members or nonmembers of a set. The problem is that many core concepts in social research are best understood as graded sets. Examples include such dichotomies as coordinated versus uncoordinated economies, national versus international politics, the public versus the private sector, states versus markets, consensus versus majoritarian systems, democratic versus nondemocratic, federal versus nonfederal, employed versus unemployed, male versus female, high versus low, established versus nonestablished, rich versus poor, and so on (see Pennings 2003). At a theoretical level, most researchers are fully aware of the problematic aspects of using these concepts as simple dichotomies. But this awareness has not been translated into the application of methodologies that are fully equipped to study diversity and complexity in a set-theoretic manner.Fuzzy sets can help social scientists conceptualize social and political phenomena as sets with imprecise boundaries between

This article provides a comparative analysis of the degree of Europeanization of national party manifestos. The research is based on a newly established database, which comprises digitized party manifestos of relevant parties in the period 1960–2003 in most of the established member states. The unit of analysis is the frequency of ‘co-mentions’ of 20 policy areas and (aspects of) Europe and the European Union. The results show that the degree to which parties acknowledge the increasing impact of Europe on policy-making depends on factors such as the time period, the type of policy sector, the duration of EU membership, the general attitude of parties towards European integration and the degree of internal consensus on European issues. Hence, references to Europe do not (only) reflect the process of European integration itself, but are affected by both insti tutional and party strategic factors.