Recent decades have witnessed substantial expansion in both international efforts to support the development of political parties as healthy organizations, and in academic comparative studies to understand how parties’ organizational choices affect political outcomes. Despite the similarities of the concerns, the overlap of these efforts has been modest. This article considers why these developments have failed to converge, pointing to different fundamental conceptions of how political parties function and what they are for. It then illustrates this gap by considering two areas of party operations (i.e. political party finance and intra-party democracy), showing the scarcity of research support for some major assumptions that justify specific party aid prescriptions. The article concludes by considering possible ways to bridge the practitioner-researcher gap in this field of study.
Scarrow et al. (2026) studied this question.