Seven imperatives for improving the measurement of party nationalization with Evidence from Chile

Party nationalization measures are often used to describe and analyze the nature of political parties and party systems. However, the term “party nationalization” is imprecise, with little consensus on how to measure it or evaluate its implications. This article advances the literature on nationalization in a number of crucial ways. In it, we make seven concrete suggestions for improving the measurement of party nationalization in theoretical terms and then demonstrate the problems and biases with existing studies through a theoretical discussion and application to Chilean political parties. Given that our theoretical and empirical analyses show there are important weaknesses in all nationalization measures, we argue in favor of approaching the phenomenon with a variety of tools in order to avoid misleading conclusions.