Although party organization plays a key role in a range of theories from democratic accountability and representation to democratic breakdown or the electoral success and persistence of parties, data on party organizational features is quite sparse, scattered and available for a limited set of countries and parties. To advance global research on party organizations, we present the Varieties of Party Identity and Organization Dataset (V-Party) – the most comprehensive dataset to date, including a wide range of information about organizational features and party stances of more than 1,900 parties in 168 coun-tries between 1970 and 2019. Here, we focus on new measures of parties’ territorial reach, ties to social organizations, candidate nomination procedures, personalization, and internal cohesion. Focusing on the organizational features of political parties, we demonstrate the usefulness and the potential of V-Party following Adcock and Collier’s (2001) three-pronged strategy to showcase V-Party’s face, crite-rion and construct validity.

This research project was supported by the Swedish Research Council [Vetenskapsrådet] [grant number 2018-016114], PI: Anna Lührmann and European Research Council [H2020 European Research Council], grant 724191, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden as well as by internal grants from the Office of the Vice- Chancellor, the Dean of the Department of Social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. Nils Düpont appreciates funding from the German Research Foundation [Deutsche Forschungsgemein- schaft] via Collaborative Research Center [SFB] 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy” at the University of Bremen.