Party institutionalization and party strength: A new global dataset
2025-11-11
Party institutionalization and strength are two distinct concepts widely used in Comparative Politics. Despite the centrality of these concepts, we lack measures of party institutionalization and strength that (1) accurately measure the concepts, (2) are measured at the party level, (3) are geographically expansive, and (4) cover a substantial temporal coverage. In this paper, we introduce the Party Institutionalization and Party Strength (PIPS) dataset. Using party-election V-Party data, we construct several measures of party institutionalization and strength for parties across the globe since 1970. In addition to individual party scores, our measures include system-level averages of party institutionalization and strength, measures that distinguish between incumbent and opposition parties, and measures of institutionalization and strength contingent on whether the party exists in a democratic or authoritarian regime.