Andrew M. Appleton and Daniel S. Ward, "Party Response to Environmental Change: A Model of Organizational Innovation," Party Politics, 3 (July 1997), 341-362.

First Paragraph:
The burgeoning interest in the adaptive qualities of party organizations has led many scholars in recent years to formulate questions about change. It is perhaps axiomatic that organizations have an inbuilt resistance to change. Yet ecological theories of organizations (parties included) have tended to emphasize the environmental imperative, either organizations adapt to new conditions in the environment, or they perish. Just how that adaptation occurs (or fails to occur) in political parties has been the subject of a number of inquiries of late.

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1: A model of party organizational innovation.
Table 1: Indicators of organizational innovation.

Last Paragraph:
As Harmel and Janda (1994) recently noted, comparative data on party organization are becoming more available, including the contributions by the Katz and Mair team and their own NSF-funded project. The concerted attempt by party scholars to generate standardized organizational measures is opening the way for rigorous hypothesis testing. This article is intended as a contribution to refining and integrating theories of party and organization in anticipation of empirical testing as the data becomes widely available.