Path: Janda's Home Page > Workshop > Canonical Analysis > Outline

Party Organization and Party Performance

 

  • I used canonical analysis to test some theory about the relationship of party organization to party performance in an early paper:
    • "Variations in Party Organization Across Nations and Differences in Party Performance," paper delivered at the 1979 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C.
    • Tyler Colman helped me update that paper for publication in Political Studies in 1998.
  • Our research examined different ways to measure "party organization":
    • centralization
    • complexity
    • involvement
    • factionalism
  • And different ways to measure "party performance":
    • electoral success
    • breadth of activities
    • legislative cohesion
  • Many scholars have sought to "type" parties:
    • Wright distinguished between the 'rational-efficient' and 'party democracy' models of behaviour according to their functions, structural characteristics, party processes, and evaluative criteria.
    • Such typologies rest on trait configurations
    • We call these trait configurations 'party syndromes'--patterns of common party traits that are exaggerated by certain parties in contrast to other parties.
  • The two party syndromes that we devised to test with canonical analysis were
    • the doctrinaire party syndrome, and
    • the mobilizing party syndrome