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While parties in established democracies have shown increasing reluctance to forge exclusive ties to organisational mediators, they have not discarded these connections. This article considers one under-explored party organisational mediator, party think tanks. In an in-depth Australian study, this article examines the significance of party think tanks as mechanisms for party linkage. It proposes that such vehicles harness some of the strengths intrinsic to affiliated external organisations and party sub-groups in ways which are more responsive to the challenge of linkage confronting modern parties. The Australia case suggests that party think tanks are used to assist parties to connect to old and new interest constituencies in flexible ways while limiting parties' exposure to electoral and political risk. The adoption of party think tanks speaks to the ongoing value parties place on organisational mediators, but on terms that they can better control.

Book Review of 'Minority Policy: Rethinking Governance when Parliament Matters'.

A source of the strength of Green parties has been their willingness to realign their distinctive organizational characteristics to suit the external environment, with the effect of pushing such organizations closer to a more conventional party type. Major organizational adaptations by Green parties have been much studied but only scant attention has been paid to the cumulative effects that 'minor' change renders to such parties. This article examines the impact of minor organizational change through an analysis of one of the oldest statewide Green parties in Australia. It finds that minor organizational changes exert a subtle but equally powerful force in moving such parties away from their amateur status to a more professional party type, even in the absence of reform to historical party structures.

Australia's main parties have experienced rapid deterioration in levels of membership but most have been reluctant to follow the lead of many of their counterparts in Western Europe and embrace more radical, inclusive pre‐selection formats to arrest declining numbers. This paper offers a partial explanation of why the Liberal and Labor parties have been disinclined to look to reforming candidate selection as a strategy to combat their shrinking rank‐and‐file membership. It argues that compulsory voting in conjunction with high levels of party identification has reduced the imperative for Australia's major parties to resort to candidate selection reform as a device to stabilise their voter base. This study underscores the important role of the institutional setting in affecting the incentives for parties to use pre‐selection reform to combat a shrinking membership base.

The influence of federalism on the organizational arrangements adopted by Australia's parties endures. This study examines the organizational structure of the State and Territory divisions of the Australian Greens through an analysis of their local party constitutions. It shows that there are important areas of difference in the organizations of state and territory Greens, despite their shared ideological commitment to inclusive internal party structures. These variations are a function of institutional and political factors, especially those induced by the Australian federal system. It is argued that differences in the organizational formats of state and territory party divisions reflect the historical circumstances in which they emerged and variations in the institutional (regional) setting in which they are located.

The rise of green parties in Australia follows a path that is well documented in the literature; the inability of other parties to accommodate environmental concerns, the increasing salience of green issues for governments and an electoral regime that permits party insurgency. This article examines how these factors have operated in Australia, and the extent to which a distinctive federal structure and federal electoral regulation of parties served to modify the emergence of a national green party. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

The rise of green parties in Australia follows a path that is well documented in the literature; the inability of other parties to accommodate environmental concerns, the increasing salience of green issues for governments and an electoral regime that permits party insurgency. This article examines how these factors have operated in Australia, and the extent to which a distinctive federal structure and federal electoral regulation of parties served to modify the emergence of a national green party.