Advisor: John Huber

Teaching and Research Interests: comparative politics, methodology, political parties, and european politics

Dissertation: "Political Party Organizations and Representation: Intraparty Institutions and Competition in Established Democracies"

Although we know that political parties play a critical role in tying politicians to voters, we have a poor understanding of the internal processes that lead some parties to be more successful than others at adopting attractive policy commitments and winning elections. In this project I examine how a party's level of decentralization with respect to candidate selection, resource allocation, and recruitment of delegates to the national party convention will shape its electoral appeal and elicit various forms of constituent support.

I test and confirm the following hypotheses. First, decentralized parties will field a more heterogeneous set of candidates than will centralized parties in countries with sufficient regional heterogeneity. Second, party heterogeneity increases the likelihood that individuals far from a party will support it, but decreases the chances that individuals close to a party will. Third, decentralized parties encourage factional conflict which subsequently decreases campaign support in the national election. I created an original database of party institutions in 66 parties in 20 parliamentary democracies, and I employ multilevel models to test the conditional hypotheses.

Methodology papers and more information about my dissertation are available on my personal website: www.columbia.edu/~gck2001.