Navigating the Landscape of Party Archives: A Compass for Social Scientists Doing Comparative Party Archival Research

ABSTRACT Political parties play important roles in contemporary and historical contexts. With the digital turn in the humanities, historians and, increasingly, political scientists are turning to party archives for doing comparative analysis. Party archives provide unique insights on the role of party structures, actors, motivations, and discourses in real time. Yet despite their institutional and scholarly importance, comparative analysis is difficult given the heterogeneous landscape of party archives. This article aims to facilitate comparative analysis. We show that the establishment of different types of party archives follows distinct motivations before we link common obstacles (location, content, searchability, and usage) arising in comparative archival work to them. These obstacles’ severity is often connected to the type of archive, where personal and scholarly archives mark the extremes. The findings can help scholars gain deeper, broader, and, above all, comparable insights about political parties.