ABSTRACT
Party changes are a traditional topic of research and a major political issue within European democracies. Country-based studies and cross-national projects have explored the transformation of political parties and resulted in a number of empirical and theoretical contributions. 1 In Southern Europe, however, political party changes have not gone hand in hand with comparative research. Hence, whereas during the last 15 years parties in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Turkey have undergone a wide range of changes and innovations, these processes have not been the subject of systematic cross-national investigation. On the one hand, there are works that focus on single parties or countries, neglecting the comparative perspective. On the other hand, the small number of publications that have adopted a cross-national perspective (for example, Ignazi & Ysmal1998; Morlino 1998; Bosco 2000; Diamandouros & Gunther 2001) cover in depth no more than the first half of the 1990s, with the sole exception of the most recent work by Van Biezen (2003) and Evans (2005) concerning Spain, Portugal and the Italian right-wing parties.
