News

New results

New research results on the legal regulation of political parties in European countries can be found on this page.

Party Regulation in Post-Communist Europe: The Balkans and the Baltics in Comparative Perspective, June 2013

Posted by Daniela Romee Piccio on Fri, May 24 2013 09:50:00

Party Regulation in Post-Communist Europe: The Balkans and the Baltics in Comparative Perspective (Amsterdam, 25-27 June 2013) 

Workshop chair: Ingrid van Biezen
Workshop discussant: Fernando Casal Bértoa

Papers

Vello Pettai (University of Tartu) - The Contribution of Party Regulation and Finance to Party System Stabilization: The Case of Estonia.
Alenka Krasovec and Danica Fink-Hafner (University of Ljubljana) - Party Regulation as an Instrument of Party System Consolidation and of Mending Party Legitimacy in Slovenia.
Janis Ikstens (University of Latvia) - Increased regulation as a road to civility? Party legislation evolution in Latvia.
Aine Ramonaite (Vilnius University) - Party regulation in Lithuania: Balancing between the efforts of consolidation and anti-party sentiment.
Goran Cular (University of Zagreb) - Party Regulation and the Party System in Croatia.

Institutions and Representation: Effects of Party Regulation on Gender Parity, March 2013

Posted by Daniela Romee Piccio on Fri, May 03 2013 16:54:00

Institutions and Representation: Effects of Party Regulation on Gender Parity
(Barcelona, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 21-23 March 2013)

Workshop convenors: Ekaterina R. Rashkova and Ingrid van Biezen
Workshop chair: Lea Sgier

Papers

Sarah Childs (University of Bristol) - Party Regulation: A Feminist Reframing.
Tània Verge (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) - Regulating Gender Equality in Political Office in Southern Europe: The Cases of Greece, Portugal and Spain.
Karen Celis and Erzeel Sivia (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) - Gender # Ethnicity. Parties regulating Descriptive Representation at the Intersection of Gender and Ethnicity.
Ekaterina R. Rashkova(Leiden University) and Emilia Zankina (American University in Bulgaria) - Does Parity Exist in the 'Macho' World?: Party Regulation and Gender Representation in the Balkans.

Contested legitimacy: Paradoxes in the legal regulation of political parties, January 2013

Posted by Daniela Romee Piccio on Wed, Feb 13 2013 16:44:00

Contested legitimacy: Paradoxes in the legal regulation of political parties
(Leiden University, January 24-25, 2013)

Workshop organizers: Fernando Casal Bértoa, Fransje Molenaar, Daniela Romée Piccio, Ekaterina Rashkova
Chair: Ingrid van Biezen

The centrality of political parties for modern representative democracies has long been underlined in the political science literature. Despite apparent signs of increasing problems with democratic legitimacy, political parties continue to be regarded as the crucial and inevitable intermediary organizations between the citizens and the state. The growing recognition of the centrality of political parties has also been recognized by European legislators and policy-makers. Indeed, the large majority of national constitutions now incorporate explicit references to political parties and the democratic functions they (ought to) perform, while at the same time a growing number of countries have started to adopted specific party laws and party finance laws aimed to regulate the political parties' internal and external organizational activities, as well as matters related to their financial management. The increasing legal regulation of political parties is related both theoretically and empirically with the concept of political legitimacy, if only because the introduction of rules on political parties is often portrayed by both national legislators and supra-national policy advisors as a way to restore public confidence in political parties and re-establish their legitimacy within the political system. The goal of this workshop is to evaluate this relationship between party regulation and democratic legitimacy, in order to provide both conceptual clarity and insights in the causes, effects, and implications of the legal regulation of political parties in modern democracy.

Papers

Lars G Svåsand (Universitetet i Bergen) - Regulations of political parties and party functions in Malawi.
Gerardo Scherlis (Universidad de Buenos Aires - Conicet) - Parties and Ballot Access in Latin America: A New Trend in a New Political Context.
Fransje Molenaar (Leiden University) - Legitimizing political party representation: The cyclical nature of party law development in Latin America.
Gayil Talshir (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) - Contested Legitimacy, Popular Democracy and the Restructuring of (some) Catch-all Parties: The Social Democrats of the UK, France and Israel in Comparative Perspective.
Fernando Casal Bértoa, Fransje Molenaar, Daniela R. Piccio, Ekaterina R. Rashkova (Leiden University) - The World Upside Down: De-Legitimizing Public Funding.
Paul Whiteley (University of Essex) - Does Regulation Make Political Parties More Popular? A Multi-level analysis of Party Support in Europe.  

Gender & Regulation - Moving Beyond Official Quotas, Leiden 2012

Posted by Daniela Romee Piccio on Wed, Jun 06 2012 14:40:00

Gender & Regulation - Moving Beyond Official Quotas, Leiden, June 28-29, 2012

Organizer: Ekaterina R. Rashkova
Chairs: Ingrid van Biezen & Ekaterina R. Rashkova

The goal of the workshop is to gather leading scholars with interest in gender and politics and encourage research on the connection between gender and regulation. Significant amount of work has been done on the subject of quotas, so our aim is to go beyond quotas alone. We hope to contribute both empirically and theoretically to the study of regulation and its effect on gender representation, gender balanced policies and practices. We are particularly interested in regulation found in party laws, constitutions, electoral laws, and other regulatory documents and how it influences gender equality. We regard the interpretation of regulation more broadly as rules and institutions in general and encourage the study of how those affect gender representation. The papers which will be presented examine an extensive range of issues in various parts of the world, and thus offer a wide and extremely interesting source for the beginning of the examination of the nexus between gender and regulation and its effect on the political development of systems overall.

I. Gender Equality Policy
Section discussant: Joyce Outshoorn (Leiden University)

Papers
Elisabetta Palici di Suni (University of Torino) - Gender Regulation in Italy between Politics and Economics
Tania Verge (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) - Gender Equality in Political Office in Southern Europe: The Cases of Greece, Portugal and Spain
Petra Meier (Universiteit Antwerpen) - Regulating Gender Relations and What They Signify for Symbolic Representation

II. Gender Representation in Comparative Perspective
Section discussant: Ingrid van Biezen (Leiden University)

Papers
Lenita Freidenvall (Stockholm University) - The Swedish Parliament: A Gender Sensitive Workplace
Ekaterina Rashkova (Leiden University) and Emilia Zankina (American University in Bulgaria) - Is it a Man's World? Comparative Analysis of the Effect of Regulation on Gender Representation in the Balkans
Sarah Childs (University of Bristol) - In the Absence of Quotas: Party Regulation and Women's Participation and Representation in British Party Politics

III. Gender Regulation and Diversity
Section discussant: Maria Spirova (Leiden University)

Papers
Karen Celis (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) - Gender Quota Interacting with Ethnic Minority Representation. Parties Regulating Descriptive Representation for Multiple Groups in Belgian Local Elections
Alexandra Dobrowolsky (Saint Mary's University) - Immigration Regulation Changes in Canada: Patchwork Policies and Threadbare Equality?

APCP Panel on Party Regulation in Southern Europe: Portugal in Comparative Perspective, Lisbon 2012

Posted by Daniela Romee Piccio on Wed, Jan 11 2012 12:13:00

APCP Panel on Party Regulation in Southern Europe: Portugal in Comparative Perspective (Lisbon, 1-3 March 2012)

Chair: Ingrid van Biezen (Leiden University)
Discussants: Carlos Jalali (University of Aveiro) and Marina Costa Lobo (ICS, Lisbon)

This panel seeks to cast empirical and theoretical light on the state of party regulation and its (non-)effects on party system development in post-authoritarian Southern Europe. In particular, all papers begin with an examination of the rules and regulations governing political parties (either in the Constitution or in the party/electoral law), seeking to explore what have been the motivations behind the formal legal recognition of political parties, trying to analyze the different modalities of party regulation in light of the various normative understandings of party democracy. In a similar vein, the papers study the historical evaluation of party funding legislation, distinguishing between the different types of sources, its salience (for political parties) and its limits. Finally, all the papers conclude with an assessment of the extent to which the different regulatory frameworks have affected (or not) the process of party system development. All in all, it is the tendency for Southern European democracies to make party structures and activities subject to increasingly intensive regulation by law, implying a closer management of partisan organizations and behavior by the state, with its (positive or negative) consequences for the party system as a whole, that becomes the object of this panel´s study.

Papers

 

Luís de Sousa and Fábio Soares - New Trends in Political Financing Regulation: the Role of Political Financing Supervisory Bodies (PFSBs)
Fernando Casal Bértoa, Juan Rodríguez Teruel, Oscar Barberá Aresté and Astrid Barrio López - Uneasiness with the Status Quo. Party Regulation and Party Finance in post-Francoist Spain (1976-2011)
Maria Chiara Pacini and Daniela Romée Piccio - Party Regulation in Italy and its Effects
Xristoforos Vernardakis - From Mass Parties to Party Cartels of Power: The Evolution of the Structure of Political Parties in Greece through Changes in their Statutes and Systems of Financing
Omer Faruk Genckaya - Stateness of Political Parties: the Impact of Political Funding on Party Organization in Turkey

 

 

 

CES Panel on Party Regulation in Post-communist Europe, Boston 2012

Posted by Daniela Romee Piccio on Tue, Jan 10 2012 14:12:00

CES Panel on Party Regulation in Post-communist Europe (Boston, 22-24 March 2012)

Chair: Conor O'Dwyer (University of Florida)
Discussant: Markus Kreuzer (Villanova University)

This panel seeks to cast empirical and theoretical light on the state of party regulation and its (non-)effects on party system development in post-communist East Central Europe. Contrary to previous works which exclusively focus on the relationship between party funding and party system consolidation (e.g. Birnir, 2005; Smilov and Toplak, 2007; etc.), this panel focuses more on the way political parties have been regulated in general since the (re-)inauguration of democracy in 1989. In particular, all papers begin with an examination of the rules and regulations governing political parties (either in the Constitution or in the party/electoral law), seeking to explore what have been the motivations behind the formal legal recognition of political parties, trying to analyze the different modalities of party regulation in light of the various normative understandings of party democracy. In a similar vein, the papers study the historical evaluation of party funding legislation, distinguishing between the different types of sources, its salience (for political parties) and its limits. Finally, all the papers conclude with an assessment of the extent to which the different regulatory frameworks have affected (or not) the process of party system development. All in all, it is the tendency for East Central European democracies to make party structures and activities subject to increasingly intensive regulation by law, implying a closer management of partisan organizations and behavior by the state, with its (positive or negative) consequences for the party system as a whole, that becomes the object of this panel´s study.

Papers

Timothy Haughton - A Law Unto Themselves: Money, Regulation and the Development of Party Politics in the Czech Republic
Gabriella Ilonszki and Réka Várgany - The Diminishing Importance of Party Regulation in Hungary. When and how do institutions matter?
Marina Popescu and Sorina Soare - Party regulation in Romania: Engineering the Party System between Self-interest and State Capture
Ekaterina Rashkova and Maria Spirova - Party Regulation in Post-communist Bulgaria
Fernando Casal Bértoa and Marcin Walecki - Party Regulation and its Effects on the Polish Party System (1991-2011)
Fernando Casal Bértoa, Kevin Deegan-Krause and Peter Ucen - The limits of regulation: Party Law and Finance in Slovakia (1990-2012) 

ECPR Panel on Party Regulation and Electoral Success, Reykjavik 2011

Posted by Daniela Romee Piccio on Thu, Jul 14 2011 13:49:00

ECPR Panel on Party Regulation and Electoral Success: Re-visiting the Cartel Party (Reykjavik, 25-27 August 2011)

Chair: Ingrid van Biezen (Leiden University)
Discussants: Fernando Casal Bértoa & Ekaterina Rashkova (Leiden University)

The link between institutions and outcomes has interested political scientists nearly as long as the discipline exists. It has only been in the recent years however that we observe an expansion of the institutional phenomena which we explore and new meanings of the phrase often used in the institutionalist tradition that ‘institutions matter’ have come to surface. One aspect of how institutions matter which has until recently remained under-explored is the relationship between party regulation and the success (or failure) of electoral contenders. The cartel party thesis suggests that the availability of state funding to political parties, the allocation mechanisms of public subsidies and other regulatory characteristics of the party law such as registration requirements may affect the degree of competition within the party system. With this panel we aim to encourage the exploration of the connection (or the lack thereof) between party law and electoral success. The panel includes papers which revisit the cartel party thesis and analyze the conditions that encourage or discourage the perpetuation of a party cartel.


Papers

Ingrid van Biezen & Ekaterina Rashkova - Breaking the Cartel: The Effect of State Regulation on Newcomers' Entry
Carina Bischoff - Barriers to Entry of New Parties
Karin Bottom - Cartelised party systems: what, where and how?
Anika Gauja - Comparative Gatekeeper Provisions in Party and Electoral Law: Sustaining the Cartel?
Gemma Loomes - The impact of cartel strategies in France, Greece, Denmark and Ireland

ECPR Conference website

IPSA-ECPR Panel on Party Regulation, Sao Paulo 2011

Posted by Daniela Romee Piccio on Fri, Dec 17 2010 16:24:00

IPSA-ECPR Panel on Party Regulation (Sao Paulo, 16-19 February 2011)

Section organizers: Ingrid van Biezen and Petr Kopecky (Leiden University)
Panel chair: Matthijs Bogaards (Jacobs University Bremen)

Political parties are indispensable for democracy, but surprisingly, the regulation of political parties has for a long time been neglected by academic research, especially in political science. Only recently has scholarly interest in party regulation increased (See Janda 2005; Müller & Sieberer 2006; Reilly 2006, 2008; Bogaards 2008; van Biezen 2008; Bogaards et al. 2010). This follows an upsurge in party regulation in old democracies and new democracies alike. In established democracies, party regulation tends to focus on the constitutionalization of parties and party finance. In new democracies, party regulation often aims at lowering the number of parties in electoral competition and parliament and at the promotion of national parties. In Sub-Saharan Africa, party regulation is an important instrument in the institutional prevention of ethnic conflict. However, little is known about the different types of party regulation, the conditions under which they were adopted, their aims and objectives, and their consequences. The panel includes papers that address these questions and especially welcomes comparative analyses.

Papers

Ingrid van Biezen & Ekaterina Rashkova – Breaking the Cartel: The Effect of State Regulation on Newcomers’ Entry
Sebastian Elischer, Anika Moroff & Matthijs Bogaards – Does Party Regulation in Africa Create National Parties?
Evangelos Kyzirakos – Law as Politics or the Birth of a New Type of Political Party?
Antonio Otavio Cintra & Marcelo Lacombe – Parties inside the Legislatures: What Kind of Regulation?
Susan Scarrow – The Evolution of Party Finance Rules and Rewards: Carrots and Sticks, Chickens and Eggs

IPSA-ECPR Sao Paulo website

Symposium: Political Parties and Public Law, Leiden 2010

Posted by Administrator on Tue, Jul 13 2010 21:43:00

Political Parties and Public Law: The Netherlands in Comparative Perspective, Leiden University, 25 June

Organizers: Ingrid van Biezen (Political Science) and Hans-Martien ten Napel (Law Faculty), Leiden University

I. Political Parties and Public Law in the Netherlands

Moderator: Henk te Velde (Leiden University)
Remco Nehmelman (Utrecht University) – Lessons from the past: Party Regulation in the Netherlands
Ruud Koole (Leiden University) – New Rules for Political Financing in the Netherlands
Hans Martien ten Napel (Leiden University) – The Dutch Political Reformed Party and Passive Female Suffrage:
       A Comparison of Two High Court Judgments in the Light of Constitutional Theory

Rick Lawson (Leiden University) – Limits to the Freedom of Speech for Politicians and MPs

II. Political Parties and Public Law in Comparative Perspective

Moderator: Petr Kopecky (Leiden University)
Richard S. Katz (Johns Hopkins University) – Democracy and the Legal Regulation of Political Parties
Tim Bale (Sussex University) – So, has it all ended in tears? What really happens when democracies ban parties
Ingrid van Biezen (Leiden University) – The Role of Supra-national Organizations in the Regulation of Parties
Evangelos Kyzirakos, Daniela Piccio & Ekaterina Rashkova (Leiden University) - Legal Regulation of Political Parties: Data and Implications