Political Parties in a Comparative Perspective (Winter term 2025/26)
Content
This seminar deals with a critical actor in representative democracies: political parties. The course is structured along four segments. The first block seeks to introduce students to the topic. Methodologically, we will learn how to approach and critically assessing the course literature. Substantively, we will discuss the importance to understand of party democracy. The second block is dedicated to the origins of political parties. We will explore how institutions and societal developments contribute to their emergence. In a third block, we will learn about their functions in democracies. We will start with their recruiting functions and assess the implications of candidate selection methods for democratic representation? Thereafter, the following three sessions deal with parties as electoral organizations. How do parties appeal to their voters? On which agenda do they decide and which groups do they target? How do they respond to their competitors? The final block is reserved for the presentation of students' projects.
You can download the most recent version of the syllabus here.The seminar takes place weekly, on Wednesday (16:15-17:45) in seminar room SCH 100.124.
Material
Week 1: Introduction
In this session, we will get to know each other and discuss some logistics about the seminar. Moreover, a brief introduction into the topic is given.Slides
Week 2: Research Design
In this session, we will discuss essentials about academic research methods.Slides
Mindmap on good research
Week 3: Why Parties?
Why do we need political parties in democracies? We will discuss whether democracies need parties and develop some working definition of political parties.Slides
Week 4: Institutions and Party Systems
In this session, we will focus on how institutions shape party systems’ origins.Slides
Mindmap (Tavits 2008)
Week 5: Political Cleavages
Are the roots of party origins tied to social conflict lines? And how have these conflicts changed over time? We will discuss the idea of political cleavages and their recent transformations.Slides
Week 6: Candidate Selection
This session marks the beginning of the third block of this seminar which deals with the functions of political parties in representative democracies. We will zoom in on their ‘recruiting function’ and discuss different means of candidate selection and their implications.Slides
Week 7: Preference Articulation and Aggregation
In this week, we'll speak about parties' articulating function: how do they decide on their programmes?Slides
Structure of introductions
Brainstorming (questions for practitioners)
