Decentralization and State-Wide Parties: Introduction

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

Directly Elected Mayors and their Parties: The Cases of Genoa and Lausanne

“…Likewise, and of particular relevance to this article, the political salience of local factors within parties at subnational level may be higher amid decentralization processes (Ansell and Gingrich 2003;Hopkin and van Houten 2009) and within long-standing federal systems (Carty and Eagles 2005). To put it simply, while there remains much within the 'black box' of party organization and change generally that we do not know about, this is particularly the case at local level.…”

Beyond Federalism: Estimating and Explaining the Territorial Structure of Government

“…7 While regional political parties rarely form governments, a regional party may precipitate regional reform as a pivot or by inducing a party in government to steal its thunder (Hopkin and Van Houten 2009;Sorens 2009;Swenden and Maddens 2009).…”

Political Elites and Decentralization Reforms in the Post-Socialist Balkans

“…On the other hand, SWPs have addressed this challenge by paying more attention to regional questions and engaging in regional affairs (Hopkin and van Houten 2009). The politicization of regional demands and how SWPs respond to them is crucial for understanding different elite agreements and decentralization reforms.…”

“…Brokers matter greatly in this regard because they can connect parties in networks and thus facilitate agreements between elites in the centre and periphery by providing more symmetrically distributed information to both sides. 5 There are several studies in the decentralization literature that stress the role regional branches of SWPs play in terms of facilitating autonomy negotiations (Roller and Van Houten 2003;Hopkin and Van Houten 2009;Van Houten 2009b).…”