New publication accepted: "Genetic Imprints, Party Life Cycles and Organizational Mortality" by Nicole Bolleyer and co-authors forthcoming in Journal of Politics
10.06.2022
It is a classical argument that how parties are born affects how they die. Nevertheless, few studies theorize and rigorously estimate the impact of formative features on the risk of organizational death. Using a life cycle perspective, Nicole Bolleyer, Patricia Correa and Gabriel Katz theorize in their article “Genetic Imprints, Party Life Cycles and Organizational Mortality: An Application of State-Space Duration Models”, forthcoming the Journal of Politics, how and when party mortality is shaped by four formative features constituting parties’ heritage. In their article, Nicole, Patricia and Gabriel focus on the effect of insider status, societal rootedness, ideological novelty, and roots in pre-existing parties. To assess the dynamic influence of these formative features on party death, they fit a state-space duration model to a dataset covering 204 party trajectories in 22 consolidated democracies. This modelling approach outperforms conventional methods and yields results that contradict the notion that formative features lose relevance as parties age. Nicole, Patricia and Gabriel’s findings indicate that insider status affects mortality risk towards parties’ mid-life, societal rootedness matters early and late in parties’ trajectories, while the combination of ideological novelty and roots in pre-existent parties matters throughout formations’ lifespan.
