Felix Von Nostitz: The Merits and Perils of Intra-Party Democracy: Assessing the Effects of Organisational Reform for Party Members

Over the past decades, major European democracy have experienced falling trust in their political representative institutions resulting in declining party membership, electoral turnout and overall political participation (van Biezen et al., 2012). In response, many European parties reformed themselves allowing for the direct participation of party members or even non-members in the leadership selection, so called primaries. The analysis will be mainly use primary and secondary documents analysis and new and existing survey data. A tentative conclusion at this stage suggest that indeed certain combinations of primary rules can lead to a positive effect for members while others do not.