Georgia Kernell, "Inside Parties: How Party Rules Shape Membership and Responsiveness" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you.
Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter, and finds connections you might have missed. For problems worth solving, get started at claude.ai/spotify.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:34)
Botox, on a botulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:47)
Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia Gravis or Lambert-Eaten syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:24)
Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:31)
When you're 7-Eleven's hottest fire chicken sandwich, people think you're intense.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:34)
Well, yeah, I'm hot!

**SPEAKER_1** (1:38)
So, yeah, intense. Want to see if you can handle the heat? Then try me.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:42)
With pickles or spicy mayo and jalapenos.
Oh, and it's all just $4.99. That's a deal almost as hot as I am.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:49)
Almost?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:50)
Sweets?

**Georgia Kernell** (1:51)
No. Spicy?

**SPEAKER_4** (1:52)
See for yourself.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:53)
$4.99 and only at 7-Eleven.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:56)
Ballot through 82546

**SPEAKER_1** (1:57)
Participating stores only while supplies last.

**Georgia Kernell** (1:58)
Visit the store for full terms.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:01)
Welcome to The New Books Network.

**Satyaki Barua** (2:05)
Hello and welcome to The New Books Network. I'm your host, Satyaki Barua. Why are some political parties more successful than others at recruiting members and developing policy commitments? This is the central question at heart of inside parties. A new book by Georgia Kernell.
While political scientists have long studied party organizations and electoral competition, we know surprisingly little about what happens inside political parties themselves. The book addresses this gap by examining how internal party rules and procedures shape party membership and political responsiveness.
Drawing on an original data set of party statutes covering 65 political parties across 20 parliamentary democracies, the book offers one of the most comprehensive studies of party organizations to date. Georgia Kernell is an associate professor at the Department of Communication and Department of Political Science at UCLA. She teaches courses on political communication, media, and politics and research methodology. She is also a research affiliate with the Future of Democracy Initiative at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. She is a faculty affiliate at UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies and the director of UCLA Political Party Organizations Lab, something we will come back to later in our conversation. To talk about our book, I'm delighted to welcome Georgia Kernell to the New Books Network. Georgia, congratulations on the book and thank you so much for joining me today.

**Georgia Kernell** (3:40)
Thank you and I'm happy to be here.

**Satyaki Barua** (3:42)
I would like to begin by asking about the origins of the book.
You opened with the debates surrounding Brexit and argue that internal workings of both the conservative and labor parties played an important role in shaping those events. You suggest that internal rules governing these political parties can have a profound consequence for their electoral fortunes. So can you take us back to the moment that sparked this project? What led you to look inside political parties to venture as you put into the secret garden of party organization? And what convinced you that these internal rules deserve much greater scholarly attention?

**Georgia Kernell** (4:26)
Yeah, so my interest in parties' internal organizations stems back way before Brexit, at least this most recent Brexit successful vote. I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, and I had taken some courses on, I had taken a class on political parties with Henry Brady, and I really loved the class.
And I had realized that I really liked studying countries outside of the US. I went to undergrad not knowing much about how things worked outside of the US, and the more I took on comparative politics, the more interested I was. And that parties' course, I think we compared party systems in five different countries, and I found it to be so exciting to see that parties don't look the same in countries outside of the US, and that still is the case today. They have different histories, they represent different groups of people, there's a different number of the parties, and they work differently internally as well. And so as an undergrad, I had also taken a methods course that had introduced me to qualitative and quantitative methods and causal inference and thinking about what that means.