The Political Party Data Base Project (PPDB) is a long-term international research program on party organizations in party-based representative democracies. The project aims to collect data on intraparty structures and member participation, parties’ financial and personal resources and their leadership management. The data collected since 2011 enable party researchers, on the one hand, to examine closely the development of parties in single countries and, on the other, to identify similarities and differences between political parties around the globe. The first round of data, which encompasses 19 countries and 122 political parties, was released in January 2017.  Round 1b, covering 6 additional countries and 24 more parties, was released in November 2018. Round 2 data collection took place in 2018-19 and covers 53 parliamentary and presidential democracies with the help of experts for each country. The Round 2 data and supplemental material were published in March 2022 at Harvard Dataverse. For more details see the appendix of the open-access article: Scarrow, Susan E., Paul D.  Webb and Thomas Poguntke (2022) Intra-Party Decision-making in Contemporary Europe: Improving Representation or Ruling with Empty Shells? Irish Political Studies, DOI: 10.1080/07907184.2022.2046430. Appropriately, the article is part of a special issue of Irish Politicsl Studies that is dedicated to the intellectual legacy of Peter Mair.

In Germany, the Düsseldorf Party Research Institute (PRuF) is responsible for collecting data on all German parties that are relevant at the national level.

We also offer a growing collection of party statutes in the original language. The project aims to make the collected data accessible to the international research community in a publicly accessible database – especially to new PhD projects.

An overview of the project and a summary of first results can be found in "Party Rules, Party Resources and the Politics of Parliamentary Democracies: How Parties Organize in the 21st Century" (Poguntke/Scarrow/Webb Party Politics 2016). In addition, volume entitled “Organizing Political Parties. Representation, Participation, and Power” edited by Scarrow, Webb & Pogunkte presented thorough comparative analyses of the data (Oxford University Press 2017).

The PPDB revives a former research project on party organizations conducted by Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair. In 1992, they published their results in “Party Organizations: A Data Handbook on Party Organizations in Western Democracies, 1960-90”, which has become a classic work in the political science literature. At the time, both Paul Webb and Thomas Poguntke participated in the project, which aimed to collect, and to internationally compare, data on party organizations between 1960 and 1990.

Research assistant: Sophie Karow, M.A. (until June 2019), Dr. Michael Angenendt (as of August 2019)

Student assistant: Pauline Marquardt, B.A.

Homepage: www.politicalpartydb.org

Project database: https://www.pruf.de/datenbanken-parteischiedsgerichte-und-ppdb/ppdb-database