The story of Party Politics (so far)

The origins

The story begins in 1993 in Manchester where David Farrell and Ian Holliday were lecturers (assistant professors) in the (then) Department of Government at the University of Manchester. Ian Holliday had been working on a paper on the French Green Party and encountered great difficulties getting the paper published in an academic journal. Knowing that David Farrell was a member of the Katz/Mair Party Organization Project (Katz and Mair, 1992, 1994), he marched into his office  one day, slapped the paper on his desk, and exclaimed: ‘Why don’t we establish a journal on party politics?’ After a few weeks of discussions and drafting, they produced a short proposal and reached out to Sage, which at that time in particular was publishing a lot of material that was party-politics related (including the two main research outputs of the Katz/Mair project). As luck would have it, the person they approached in Sage was Ziyad Marar, a very enterprising albeit still quite junior editor within the publishing house (he is now President of Sage Global Publishing).

Several weeks later Marar met with Farrell and Holliday in Manchester for a discussion about the potential of a new journal. One key bit of advice was that there was a need for a third editor, someone more senior in the profession and who was U.S.-based. David Farrell had encountered Ken Janda (a distinguished member of academic faculty at Northwestern University) a year earlier at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions in Limerick, where they were both participants in a Workshop led by Dick Katz and Peter Mair (which, apart from anything else, was when they presented their Cartel Party paper for the first time). Janda is a leading light in the field of party politics and was one of the founders of the Political Organizations and Parties (POP) Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). He accepted the invitation to be the third editor of Party Politics without demur. His one firm suggestion was that a sub-title be added to the journal: ‘The International Journal for the Study of Political Parties and Political Organizations.’

The final members of the editorial team to be appointed were Paul Webb (University of Sussex, also a member of the Katz/Mair project) who became the Associate and Reviews Editor, and Shaun Bowler (University of California, Riverside) who was also appointed as an Associate Editor. ¹

If it was to succeed it was important that the journal was seen to have wide support across the party politics community. A key indicator of this was the membership of the editorial board, which included such luminaries as Jean Blondel, Ronald Inglehart, Dick Katz, Michael Laver, Kay Lawson, Joni Lovenduski, Peter Mair, Pippa Norris, Giovanni Sartori and Colette Ysmal. It also benefited from strong support from relevant specialist groups of party politics scholars, notably the Standing Group on Political Parties (SGPP) of the ECPR, and the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (EPOP) Specialist Group of the UK Political Studies Association (PSA); for a period of time it also had a close association with the POP Section of APSA.

The contract for the new journal between the editors and Sage was signed on March 8, 1994. It is worth quoting in full the ‘editorial aims of the Journal’ that were included in Schedule 1 of the contract:

1. The purpose of the Journal is to publish (in English) articles, reviews and scholarly comment which have been judged worthy of publication by appropriate specialists and accepted by the Editor on studies relating to party politics, by which is understood:

Analysis of the character and organisation of political parties, and their place in the political system. This includes work that looks at their histories of development, ideologies, policies and status. This also includes work that disaggregates parties – in terms of membership, financial base, branch structure, affiliated groups, executives, parliamentary factions – and work that looks at their electoral functions – electoral programmes, campaigns, campaign strategies, national and local organisation. The journal will also include analyses of changing party systems; as well as work on non-party organisations such as pressure groups.

As is apparent from this text, from its establishment the journal aimed at publishing high-quality work that covered the field of party politics in the broadest sense, including by scholars of political organizations (consistent with the journal’s sub-title). Party politics, as a sub-discipline in political science, had been going through a renaissance (as can be seen by key publications, such as those of Janda, 1980; Katz and Mair, 1992, 1994; and Panebianco, 1988, for instance), which also involved something of a paradigm shift, with far greater focus on the internal dynamics of political parties (as opposed to research on party systems), as reflected in the opening paragraph of the above text.

The mechanics of establishing a new journal in a pre-internet age

Journal publishing today is very different from 30 years ago. The early 1990s was a pre-internet age: there may have been emails, but their usage was still quite limited, and social media had yet to be invented. This meant that pretty much all correspondence had to be done by snail-mail, all processes by hand, and spreading of the word about the new journal by word of mouth. We can see this reflected in the efforts to attract good copy to the new journal, and in developing a robust system for processing submissions.

It was critical that the journal arrive with a splash. Therefore a lot of thought was given to the first issue, which included articles by some of the editorial board members, including Katz and Mair’s seminal work on the Cartel Party (Katz and Mair, 1995), which was to become one of the most widely cited papers in the history of postwar scholarship on political parties - though it should be noted that the article that attracted the most citations in the first few years was John Huber and Ronald Inglehart’s ‘Expert interpretations of party space and party locations in 42 societies’ (Huber and Inglehart, 1995), which also appeared in the first issue – primarily due to the fact that, on the authors’ insistence, the article included all the raw data in a long appendix (again, this was long before the days of online appendices), which attracted considerable interest from the developing community of scholars working on expert surveys.

To help the journal bed down in its first year or two, the strategy was to be proactive in generating good copy. To that end, it was decided to organise a conference on ‘Party Politics in the Year 2000’ to launch the first issue of the journal in 1995. The conference was held at the University of Manchester, attracting over 180 participants (a large portion of them from overseas), many of them providing papers that, after suitable peer-review, filled the first few issues of the new journal. The other way of attracting article submissions was by touring the ‘paper rooms’ at the major international political science conferences. A now long-forgotten practice of bygone pre-internet years was the requirement that paper-givers lodge multiple copies of their conference papers in a room for sharing with other delegates as well as with journal editors hungry for copy.

The fact that virtually everything was paper-based also impacted on how the workload was divided between the editorial team, and how paper submissions were managed. In the first instance, a division of labour was agreed between the three editors, with Ian Holliday and David Farrell handling the manuscripts in Manchester, and Ken Janda taking charge of special projects, the most significant of which was to produce a system for producing keywords for papers in a more systematic fashion. He also developed the first website for the journal, later replaced by a dedicated one created by Sage. The paper submission process, which borrowed heavily from the system used by then editor of Political Studies, Mick Moran (another Manchester colleague), was based on a series of paper filing trays, elastic bands, and a cover sheet that was attached to a paper as it transferred between trays at different stages of the review and decision-making process. This was a very labour-intensive operation, requiring the support of PhD students as editorial assistants – including Liz Carter, who went on to be a senior lecturer at the University of Keele; it was also a process that required a lot of the editors in finding suitable reviewers (and not over-using the same ones). Overall, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, this paper-based manuscript management system worked well enough – apart from the odd mishap where a paper may have been left for a time festering in the wrong filing tray. But inevitably, as the number of submissions increased, and as technological and internet developments allowed, it was only a matter of time before management of the journal was streamlined and rendered more appropriate to the 21st century.

The development of the journal over time

Journal publishing has evolved quite dramatically over the years, and Party Politics has been no exception to this. This is reflected, for instance, in the number of submissions which increased year-on-year, putting great strain on the creaky paper submission system, and causing ever more difficult decisions for the editors struggling to keep within annual page budgets. The latter meant that inevitably there was a growing number of ‘accepted’ papers left gathering dust in the final paper filing tray for months on end, in some instances for over a year. A partial reprieve resulted from the decision in 2001 to increase the number of issues per volume from four to six. Subsequently, the backlog was further reduced by an expansion of the number of papers published in each issue. Ultimately, the problem was in large part fixed by the introduction of ‘online first’ publication of accepted papers.

The paper filing trays were finally dispensed with in April 2006 when the journal adopted the ScholarOne paper processing system. This was nothing short of revolutionary in terms of speeding up the processing of paper submissions, but crucially also in providing much needed tracking of academic colleagues for the vital task of refereeing papers, not least to ensure that the same people are not approached too regularly.

The past two decades have also seen significant changes in the editorial line up. In 2003 Ian Holliday retired as Editor and was succeeded by Paul Webb, with Paul’s Sussex colleague Aleks Szczerbiak becoming the Associate and Reviews Editor. Ken Janda retired as Editor in 2016, and David Farrell in 2019.

What have we covered?

A decade ago, Ken Janda penned a short paper analysing the types of research papers published in the journal up to its 20th birthday (Janda, 2015). We are in a position to update this now in order to provide a sense of the substantive themes the journal has covered. Moreover, we might reasonably claim that, given Party Politics’ status as a specialist journal, such analysis serves the purpose of telling a story about the general development of this field of political science. Like Janda, we do this by analysing the keywords nominated by authors. Janda sets out three main reasons for attaching keywords to articles, which he labels face value, internal retrieval value, and external retrieval value. He explained that ‘just by looking at the first page of an article, busy readers can scan its keywords to determine whether they want to read it. Thus keywords have ‘face value’ in attracting readers’ interest’ (Janda, 2015: 7). By ‘internal retrieval value’ Janda simply meant that keywords are a useful way of highlighting relevant papers that this particular journal has published. ‘External retrieval value’ refers to the use of keywords to compare Party Politics outputs to those of other outlets. Such analyses can be achieved through search engines such as Google Scholar, although of greater direct relevance for this journal is Sage’s own advanced search engine. We will draw on this to update and expand on Janda’s analysis from a decade ago.

In the first 30 years (1995–2024) of Party Politics, some 1,947 research articles, research notes and special issue introductions were published in the journal. A further 371 book reviews were published, although for the purpose of this analysis, we will exclude these reviews since they do not contain original research. Our analysis is restricted to 100 commonly occurring keywords, some of which are thematic while others relate to geographically defined countries, continents or regions of interest. Most items have more than one keyword, so there will be more keywords than the total number of articles. Clearly, moreover, it should be borne in mind that these keywords will sometimes overlap (for instance, Western Europe and the EU, Eastern Europe and Poland, polarization and partisanship, etc.). Note that our analysis deliberately excludes any use of the words ‘parties’ or ‘party politics’ as keywords since we take it to be intrinsically obvious that every item published in the journal will concern these subjects; it is therefore redundant to focus on them. On the other hand, we do include ‘party systems’ as a category of particular interest, since this constitutes a specialized sub-field within the general scholarship on political parties. We divide our analysis into thematic keywords and geographic designations, and we will look at the changing salience of keywords over time.

Figure 1 reveals the frequency of 58 different themes found in Party Politics articles over the first three decades of its operation (See also Table A1 in the Appendix.). Each has a minimum frequency of five occurrences. The top seven all occur more than 100 times, with ‘elections’ leading the way by some considerable distance. It is followed, in order, by ‘party systems,’ ‘candidates,’ ‘party organization,’ ‘electoral systems,’ ‘campaigning’ and ‘communication.’ Plainly, some of these might well overlap - ‘candidates’ and ‘party organization,’ for instance, given that much work has been conducted on matters of candidate-selection as a feature of party organizational life; ‘elections,’ ‘electoral systems,’ ‘campaigning’ and ‘communication’ might also be connected as overlapping themes. Either way, this confirms the perennial importance of party systems, electoral processes and party organizations for scholars and citizens of liberal democracies.

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Figure 1.

Most frequently stated themes in Party Politics article keywords, 1995–2024.

Figure 2 shows the number of times that geographical entities have features in keywords. Again, we restrict the analysis to those places mentioned at least five times. 10 places have at least 20 mentions, with U.S.A. leading the way, followed by the U.K., Germany, Africa, Latin America, Spain, Israel, Canada, Russia and Japan.

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Figure 2.

Most frequently stated geographical entities in Party Politics article keywords, 1995–2024.

But what of changes over time? This is perhaps how we can gain the strongest impression of the evolving agendas of party scholarship. Figures 3 and 4 provide a measure of such evolution by showing the change in keyword frequencies from the first decade of the journal’s operation (1995–2004) to the third decade (2015–2024). The first of these figures deal with the changing salience of themes addressed. ‘Elections,’ which was already the most frequently cited keyword in the first decade (with 76 mentions) also enjoyed the biggest increase in mentions over time (to 199), a jump of 123. The biggest ‘mover’ in this hit-parade of keywords, however, is ‘populism,’ which is second only to ‘elections.’ In Party Politics’ first decade only two articles listed populism as a keyword, and even in the second decade this had only increased moderately to 11 mentions; however, some 56 papers listed populism as a keyword in the third decade, an increase of 54 from the period 1995–2004. Indeed, some 81 percent of all mentions of populism in the journal occurred between 2015 and 2024. And this analysis does not even take into account the use of ‘radical right’ as a keyword, a frequent synonym for populism in the eyes of many researchers and observers, of course. Indeed, ‘radical right’ has undergone a similar trajectory, albeit at a lower level, from just a single mention in the first decade to 18 mentions in the third decade; again more than 80 percent of all citations of ‘radical right’ as a keyword happen in the third decade of the journal’s existence. This increasingly intense focus of academic scholarship on populism, especially its radical right variant, reflects the obvious incursion of this party family into the consciousness of observers as it has made clear progress in terms of electoral support and governing participation during recent decades.

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Figure 3.

Change in frequency of keyword themes, from first to third decade of publication.

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Figure 4.

Change in frequency of geographical entities, from first to third decade of publication.

Readers can view the detail of Figure 3 (and the attendant Table A2 in the Appendix) at their leisure, but we will draw particular attention to a few other keywords that feature in the top 15 of ‘upward movers.’ ‘Partisanship’ and ‘polarization’ fit together in a logical way, and these have both become much more prominent, moving from just 3 and 4 mentions among our keywords respectively in the first decade of the journal’s existence to 33 and 26 in the third decade; indeed, if we add the two keywords together, on the assumption that they are closely related phenomena, they would shift up to second place in the overall table (although the case could also be made that terms like ‘elections’ and ‘campaigning’ could be similarly combined to make a far higher overall number). ‘Government’ and ‘coalition’ also feature prominently in the list of subjects on which our contributors have been increasingly inclined to focus their research, in 4th and 9th places respectively, reflecting the continuing (and growing) interest in questions of cabinet formation, composition and termination. And we should not overlook the enhanced focus on papers dealing with gender and politics, which have increased from just 4 mentions to 32 over the decades. At the other end of the scale, few themes have become notably less prominent over time, although some of the older mainstream party families – communism, social democracy and Christian democracy – show a slight drop-off in scholarly attention.

Figure 4 reveals the pattern of change in keyword mentions of countries and related geographical entities. Germany, Western Europe, Latin America, Spain, Africa, Turkey and Belgium lead the way in terms of places on which there has been a growing focus of attention, while work on Russia, Canada, New Zealand and Italy has diminished. It should be said, however, that geographical locations are generally mentioned less than themes in keywords, so the patterns of change are less pronounced in Figure 4 than in Figure 3.

Who has covered it?

Aside from the thematic content, another key component is the scholars who have shaped the field of party politics. For this analysis, we include all types of manuscripts (research articles, research notes, editorial and special issue introductions, and book reviews), amounting to a total of 1,582 publications. The focus is on the list of authors, with a particular attention to the evolution of authorship patterns over time.

A first aspect of authorship is the proportion of publications that are single-authored or co-authored. Figure 5 illustrates the changes in authorship across the journal’s history. The trend is clear. In the first decade (1995–2004), single authorship was predominant, with nearly two-thirds of the publications written by a single scholar. The following decade (2005–2014) saw a shift toward a more balanced distribution between single and co-authored works. In the most recent decade, this pattern reversed, with co-authored publications becoming the norm, accounting for 61.6% of the journal’s output. This trend is not specific to the field of party politics; rather, it is a feature of political science as a discipline (Grossman et al., 2026).

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Figure 5.

Single versus co-authored articles in Party Politics by decade, 1995–2024.

A second aspect of authorship is gender balance. Inferring gender from authors’ first names is a complex task due to linguistic diversity, the presence of gender-neutral first names, and the inherent limitations of assigning gender without self-identification. However, in the absence of self-declared gender data, we rely on this proxy. We employed a first-name-to-gender automated classification process using Copilot, instructing it to leave cells blank in case of doubt. Our list of authors being reasonably long (1,604), we manually verified the coding and supplemented it for missing values. Figure 6 presents the pattern in the gender of authors over time. In the first decade (1995–2004), there was a pronounced imbalance, with 82.2 percent of authors being male. The next decade saw some progress, with female authorship increasing by approximately 10 percentage points. However, this increase has plateaued in the most recent decade, leaving the journal’s pattern of authorship still far from gender parity.

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Figure 6.

Gender of authors in Party Politics by decade, 1995–2024.

What has been picked up?

Journals and journal articles exist to be read. In line with the cumulative nature of science and the principles of open science, it is essential that scholarly work is discussed and contributes to the cumulative building of knowledge. One indicator of a publication’s impact, albeit imperfect, is its citation count. While not ideal, citation numbers offer some insight into how much a piece of work has influenced its subfield. Party Politics has consistently featured in the top 20 of political science journals in the world in terms of Google Scholar’s H5 citation index count (standing at 16th as of November 2025).

Which articles have been most prominent in attracting citations? Table 1 focuses on publications of the journal that have received 200 citations or more. This favours older publications that have had more time to be read and cited. In total, 30 publications have surpassed this threshold according to Scopus. Of these, only three have appeared in the last decade: the presentation of the Chapel Hill expert survey data by Bakker and colleagues, and two influential studies on populism (Rooduijn and Akkerman’s ‘Flank attacks: Populism and left-right radicalism in Western Europe,’ and Schumacher and van Kersbergen’s ‘Do mainstream parties adapt to the welfare chauvinism of populist parties?’).

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Table 1.

Most frequently cited articles in Party Politics, 1995–2024.

Author full names	Title	Year	Cited by
Katz, Richard S.; Mair, Peter	Changing models of party organization and party democracy: The emergence of the cartel party	1995	2178
Huber, John; Inglehart, Ronald	Expert interpretations of party space and party locations in 42 societies	1995	648
Bakker, Ryan; de Vries, Catherine; Edwards, Erica; Hooghe, Liesbet; Jolly, Seth; Marks, Gary; Polk, Jonathan; Rovny, Jan; Steenbergen, Marco; Vachudova, Milada Anna	Measuring party positions in Europe: The Chapel Hill expert survey trend file, 1999–2010	2015	639
Mair, Peter; Van Biezen, Ingrid	Party membership in 20 European democracies, 1980-2000	2001	530
Caul, Miki	Women’s representation in parliament: The role of political parties	1999	437
Kitschelt, Herbert	Formation of party Cleavages in Post-Communist democracies: Theoretical Propositions	1995	404
Barr, Robert R.	Populists, outsiders and anti-establishment politics	2009	395
Gunther, Richard; Diamond, Larry	Species of political parties: A new typology	2003	393
van Spanje, Joost	Contagious parties: Anti-immigration parties and their impact on other parties’ immigration stances in contemporary western Europe	2010	352
De Vries, Catherine E.; Edwards, Erica E.	Taking Europe to its extremes: Extremist parties and public Euroscepticism	2009	343
Rahat, Gideon; Hazan, Reuven Y.	Candidate selection methods: An analytical framework	2001	334
Randall, Vicky; Svåsand, Lars	Party institutionalization in new democracies	2002	324
Rooduijn, Matthijs; de Lange, Sarah L.; van der Brug, Wouter	A populist Zeitgeist? Programmatic contagion by populist parties in Western Europe	2014	311
Mainwaring, Scott; Zoco, Edurne	Political sequences and the stabilization of interparty competition: Electoral volatility in old and new democracies	2007	298
Ezrow, Lawrence; de Vries, Catherine; Steenbergen, Marco; Edwards, Erica	Mean voter representation and partisan constituency representation: Do parties respond to the mean voter position or to their supporters?	2011	292
Norris, Pippa	Preaching to the converted?: Pluralism, participation and party websites	2003	271
Carty, R.Kenneth	Parties as Franchise systems: The stratarchical organizational Imperative	2004	262
Whiteley, Paul F.	Is the party over? The decline of party activism and membership across the democratic world	2011	255
Schedler, Andreas	Anti-political-establishment parties	1996	251
Jones, Mark P.; Mainwaring, Scott	The nationalization of parties and party systems: An empirical measure and an application to the Americas	2003	249
Katz, Richard S.	The problem of candidate selection and models of party democracy	2001	241
Rooduijn, Matthijs; Akkerman, Tjitske	Flank attacks: Populism and left-right radicalism in Western Europe	2017	241
Vergeer, Maurice; Hermans, Liesbeth; Sams, Steven	Online social networks and micro-blogging in political campaigning: The exploration of a new campaign tool and a new campaign style	2013	236
Schumacher, Gijs; van Kersbergen, Kees	Do mainstream parties adapt to the welfare chauvinism of populist parties?	2016	233
Bille, Lars	Democratizing a democratic procedure: Myth or reality? Candidate selection in Western European parties, 1960–1990	2001	230
Ladrech, Robert	Europeanization and political parties: Towards a framework for analysis	2002	229
De Lange, Sarah L.	A new winning formula?: The programmatic appeal of the radical right	2007	223
Van Biezen, Ingrid	Political parties as public utilities	2004	217
Balmas, Meital; Rahat, Gideon; Sheafer, Tamir; Shenhav, Shaul R.	Two routes to personalized politics: Centralized and decentralized personalization	2014	213
Lucardie, Paul	Prophets, purifiers and prolocutors: Towards a theory on the emergence of new parties	2000	203

Notably, the two most cited publications appeared in the very first issue of the journal, underscoring the success of its initial editorial choices. Overall, these highly cited works focus on parties in the electorate, parties and party systems, and parties as organisations.