Intra-party democracy (IPD) allows party members to engage in deliberation, form preferences and fight for the representation of those preferences in the party's agenda. Intra-party democracy is also a source of legitimacy for any major organizational decisions: from candidate selection to the adoption of electoral strategies or to changing the party's policy positions. Parties in Central and Eastern Europe are rarely included in comparative studies of the topic, hence we know very little about practices of intra-party democracy in the region and their determinants. This study aims to fill this gap by analyzing the drivers of intra-party democracy in 88 parties from 10 Central and Eastern European countries. To do so, it combines data from a recent expert survey with data regarding the ideological positions of the parties and their organizational features. The preliminary results of our multivariate regression analyses indicate that leftist parties in CEE have, on average, higher levels of intra-party democracy, than right-wing parties, while older parties seem to exhibit more democratic practices compared to younger ones. Party membership levels and electoral size do not seem to matter. Last but not least, the more a party embraces a populist rhetoric, the lower its intra-party democracy levels.
