Ingrid van Biezen, "On the Internal Balance of Party Power: Party Organizations in New Democracies," Party Politics, 6 (October 2000), 395-417.

First Paragraph:
In many of the more recently established democracies in Europe, the linkage between parties and society is generally considered to be weak (see e.g. Pridham, 1990; Rose and Mishler, 1998). This does not imply that parties are irrelevant to new democratic polities, of course, or that these parties are characterized by an overall lack of organizational consolidation. As Katz and Mair (1995) have pointed out in the context of the long-established western democracies, the perceived decline of parties has been manifested primarily or almost exclusively at the level of society, and has in fact been counterbalanced by a greater access to and an increasing control of the state. In other words, with time, different aspects of the party may become more privileged, and particularly in recent years it has been argued that it is the party in public office that has gained most in importance (see also Katz and Mair, 1993).

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: Composition of narrow executives

Last Paragraph:
The analysis presented in this paper has revealed that although public office holders clearly occupy a central position in parties in newly established democracies, our expectation that the party in public office will increasingly emerge as the predominant face of the party organization cannot be sustained. If anything, it is the party central office that emerges as the institutional actor. This also suggests that the relation between the party in public office and the party central office is actually more complex than is generally assumed. Certainly as far as the new democracies considered here are concerned, party organizations appear to have become increasingly controlled from a small centre of power located at the intersection of the extra- parliamentary party and the party in public office.
But why should this be the case? And why, contrary to our generally plausible expectations, should the party in public office not have achieved an unequivocal predominance? As has been suggested above, we can perhaps best interpret these counter-intuitive findings as reflecting a desire to increase party cohesion and so reduce the potentially destabilizing consequences of emerging intra-party conflicts, which themselves are an inevitable by-product of the context of weakly developed party loyalties and a generalized lack of party institutionalization. In addition, it may be easier for the party leadership to control many of the parties' essential activities, such as the allocation of financial resources or the process of candidate selection, if that control is exercised from within the party executive rather than from within the party in public office. In other words, consolidating its position within the party executive provides the party leadership with a relatively stable and predictable organizational foundation, which is a particularly valuable asset in a climate of frequent party ruptures. In these cases, at least, it appears to be the party executive that constitutes the organizational base that can best withstand the consequences of the volatile environment of a newly emerging democracy.