Patricia Correa
Aston University, Politics and International Relations, Faculty Member
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Political parties are the key players of the Spanish political system. Their dom- inant role also makes them the most poorly rated political institutions. Unlike other countries, three main features distinguish the Spanish party system:... more
Political parties are the key players of the Spanish political system. Their dom- inant role also makes them the most poorly rated political institutions. Unlike other countries, three main features distinguish the Spanish party system: its historical discontinuity, its organizational weaknesses and the relevance of the regional parties. The first section of the chapter summarizes the conditions and criteria to become a party member as well as the rights and obligations. The focus then shifts to com- ment the evolution of party membership figures from the restoration of democracy onwards. The last section describes the main empirical findings of the last wave of party congress delegate surveys.
Research Interests:
When do membership-based civil society organizations such as interest groups, political parties or service-oriented organizations consider their existence under threat? Distinguishing pressures of organizational self-maintenance from... more
When do membership-based civil society organizations such as interest groups, political parties or service-oriented organizations consider their existence under threat? Distinguishing pressures of organizational self-maintenance from functional pressures of goal attainment, which all voluntary membership organizations – irrespective of their political or societal functions - need to reconcile, we propose a framework theorizing distinct categories of drivers of mortality anxiety in organized civil society. To test our hypotheses, we apply ordered logistic regression analysis to new data covering regionally and nationally active interest groups, service-oriented organizations and parties in Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the UK. We find that factors enhancing intraorganizational resilience thereby facilitating self-maintenance as well as exposure to different representation challenges complicating goal attainment have significant effects on mortality anxiety experienced by interest ...
Research Interests:
Although democratic states increasingly regulate political parties, we know little about how legal environments shape parties’ internal lives. This article conceptualizes and measures the “juridification” of party organizations’ conflict... more
Although democratic states increasingly regulate political parties, we know little about how legal environments shape parties’ internal lives. This article conceptualizes and measures the “juridification” of party organizations’ conflict regulation regimes: that is, the extent to which parties replicate external legal standards (e.g. norms of due process) within their own procedures. Formulating hypotheses on juridification within different parties and legal environments, we examine intra-party juridification across four democracies with most different party law provisions. While party juridification varies—reflecting parties’ ideological differences—in contexts where organizational governance remains unregulated, once intra-organizational governance is subject to statutory constraints, parties emulate legal norms embedded in the state legal system, transcending what is legally required, which has important repercussions for how the law shapes civil society organizations generally.