ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on political organisations that avail to belong to the liberal tradition: the liberal parties. It aims at investigating how liberal parties in Europe have evolved over time, in a comparative perspective. The book discusses the applicability of the concept of party family to liberal parties. It analyses liberal parties along four dimensions, linked to some extent to P. Mair and C. Mudde's approaches to the concept of party family: their origins, development and the sociological composition of their electorate; their ideological and programmatic positions; their participation to power; and their organisational structure. Paradoxically, despite the major role of liberalism and liberal parties in the emergence of most modern European representative democracies and in today's national and European political spaces, few scientific contributions have been dedicated to this party family.
