Most political parties operate on several territorial levels, but we have only limited theoretical understanding of multi-level party dynamics. This article presents a delegation framework for studying the interaction between the national leadership and regional branches in state-wide parties. Assuming a principal—agent relationship, the national leadership can obtain benefits from delegating tasks to a regional branch, but also faces possible costs in doing this. The rules and conventions regulating the multi-level interaction in parties are possible mechanisms by which to control the actions and policies of regional branches. These include formal party rules, informal party procedures and conventions, and state laws affecting party organizations. The framework provides an agenda and hypotheses for empirical research, research that should focus on crisis situations in parties, on what regional branches cannot do (instead of just documenting the activities of branches), and on the role of parties in shaping state laws and regulations.

No abstract

Most political parties are simultaneously active at multiple territorial levels of government. Besides the national level, which is typically most salient, most parties operate at one or more sub-national levels, and -within the European Union -at the European level. 1 This straightforward, but largely ignored, observation raises important questions about how parties deal with their multi-level activities. For example, how do parties organize themselves across different levels? And how do they design and coordinate their electoral strategies across different -national, sub-national or supra-nationalelections?The trend of political decentralization in recent decades has made these issues even more pertinent than before. As reflected in the focus of most of the contributions to this issue, this trend is especially clear in Western Europe. Countries such as Spain, France, Belgium, Italy and the United Kingdom have all, to varying degrees, decentralized powers to sub-national levels of government. Decentralization, however, has also occurred in other parts of the world, often in conjunction with processes of democratization. The result of this trend has been the emergence or increased importance of the subnational level as an arena of political decision-making and political competition, as was already the case in federal states such as the United States, Canada, Germany and India. Political parties, especially those operating across the whole territory of a state ('state-wide parties'), are important actors in these dynamics, as they both shape processes of decentralization and federalism and need to respond to political imperatives induced by the territorial structure of a state.The existing literature on political parties and party systems has paid only limited attention to the territorial organization of parties and their activities in multi-level political systems. Territorial, or centre-periphery, cleavages have been acknowledged as important factors shaping the nature of party systems (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967), but the impact of such cleavages on the organization and strategies of state-wide parties has mostly been ignored. Duverger (1959: 52-60) identifies the degree of centralization as a crucial characteristic of party organizations, influenced mostly by the historical origins of a party (cf. Panebianco, 1988) and its financing method for election

This article presents a model of the triangular relationship between minority, majority, and the minority's reference state which is a feature of many ethnic relations. The presence of a reference state can overcome a potential commitment problem between minority and majority if it is perceived to be both militarily strong and moderately irredentist. Empirical material from Croatia, Transylvania, Estonia and Crimea suggests the plausibility of the model. Russia's role as a reference state is particularly interesting.

Regional autonomy demands are widespread in Western Europe and are often seen as a significant challenge to the authority of the European 'nation states'. This article formulates and tests possible explanations for variation in such demands in six Western European countries. As suggested by the existing literature, several cultural and economic characteristics of regions are associated with autonomy demands. To account for further variation and differences in specific demands, however, it is necessary to focus on the nature of party competition in a region. Autonomy demands will be strong if several regionally organized parties compete against each other and more restrained if regional and national parties are in competition. This suggests that regionalism is generally less consequential for existing state structures than often presumed. It seriously challenges state structures only under certain political conditions.