Measuring Intra-Party Democracy : A Guide for the Content Analysis of Party Statutes with Examples from Hungary, Slovakia and Romania

This book presents an integrated approach to measuring the level of intra-party democracy through deductive and standardized content analysis of party statutes.

Following the two main criteria of intra-party democracy – inclusiveness and decentralization – three main categories of intra-party democracy are theoretically derived: members’ rights, organizational structure and decision-making.

On the basis of theoretical considerations further sub-categories and individual items are deduced from these main categories and put together into a comprehensive coding scheme.

Furthermore, precise coding instructions are presented.

Since it is the ultimate aim of this book to present an approach to measuring the level of intra-party democracy for any party statute and to express this in numerical terms, the final step is the quantification of the coded data and the calculation of a numeric measure of intra-party democracy.

A numeric value of intra-party democracy can be calculated for any statute of any political party.

Furthermore, empirical examples from Hungary, Slovakia and Romania are presented. ?