Party People Candidates and Party Evolution

Political parties are nothing without their people and candidates are essential to parties' core functions - contesting elections, filling political offices, and shaping policy. Candidates are the literal 'face' of parties, yet they are not wedded to them permanently: candidates can enter or leave politics, switch parties, move along or stay behind when parties split or merge. Even in parties that look stable, candidate change happens below the surface, ultimately altering what the parties stand for. Inspired by evolutionary theories, Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution conceptualizes candidates as 'party genes' and develops a candidate-based approach to party evolution. Tracking candidates between elections and parties opens up new perspectives on party development in complex and dynamic settings in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and beyond. Based on a new database of 200,000 electoral candidates from over 60 elections across nine CEE democracies, this book presents a groundbreaking study of party evolution using candidate change as an indicator of party change. Allan Sikk and Philipp Köker offer a series of methodological and conceptual advances for the measurement of candidate turnover, party fission and fusion, programmatic change, and party leadership change; the resulting analyses make a significant contribution to the study of CEE party politics as well as to the general scholarship on elections, parties, and political change.

Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterized by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu.

The series is edited by Nicole Bolleyer, Chair of Comparative Political Science, Geschwister Scholl Institut, LMU Munich and Jonathan Slapin, Professor of Political Institutions and European Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.

Allan Sikk, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics, University College London,Philipp Köker, Lecturer and Research Fellow in Comparative Government, Leibniz University Hannover

Allan Sikk is an Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His research focuses on European electoral and party politics, research methods, and political and social transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. His work has been published in journals including the European Journal of Political Research and Party Politics, and in edited volumes from Oxford University Press and Routledge.

Philipp Köker is a Lecturer and Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science, Leibniz University Hannover. His research focuses on presidential politics, political parties and elections, and comparative constitutional law. He is the author of Presidential Activism and Veto Power in Central and Eastern Europe (Palgrave, 2017) and of contributions to Democratization, East European Politics, Party Politics, the Review of Central and East European Law, and The Oxford Handbook of Polish Politics, among others.