Parties as Franchise Systems

Abstract

The article begins by identifying a number of apparently dissonant characteristics of modern party organization, suggesting that they define patterns of internal organizational relationships that are more stratarchical than hierarchical. To provide a framework for analysing the structure and activities of stratarchical parties, the article develops a franchise model of party organization. After identifying the essential elements of the franchise party, and particularly the contract that defines it, the article points to how the model elucidates the distinctive character of factionalism, membership and leadership in modern political parties.

The Preparation and Use of Election Manifestos: Learning from the Irish Case

“…Given that the Green Party has made the process more inclusive and that Labour (and possibly Sinn Féin) is opening up the process for the next manifesto, a trend may be emerging. This is at odds with what is predicted by influential party organization theories (Katz & Mair, 1995Carty, 2004). The findings that preparation varies across Irish parties and that the documents serve important functions other than addressing voters suggest that students of party competition should take these factors into account when analysing manifestos.…”

“…First, recent theories of party organization take into account the notion that party leaders value flexibility with regard to programmatic party competition (Duverger, 1954;Strøm, 1990) and therefore seek to control policy formulation (Carty, 2004). Leaders may also try to exclude party activists with extreme preferences from this process (Katz & Mair, 1995).…”

The territoriality of personalization: New avenues for decentralized personalization in multi-level Western Europe

“…In 'personalization', the party is sometimes treated as a 'fall guy' to be compared to the candidate without elaboration. In this study of multi-level systems, as per Carty (2004), it is very clear that the 'party' that personalization compares with varies from territoriality to territoriality. The party could be franchised, could be factionalized, or even fractured.…”

“…For evaluating the campaign funding conjecture, campaign funding data of course is preferred. However, if that is not possible for privacy concerns, researchers could approach by asking how much the candidate values the work done by the national party organization (Karlsen and Skogerbø, 2015: 432) and the regional party organization to fully capture the franchise party dynamics suggested by Carty (2004). But most importantly, there should be a clear definition of what 'party' organization that is being studied, and how important are these different organizations to candidates running at different levels of government.…”

“…It refers to the relative importance of quite different party organizations at different territorial levels of analysis. These observations relate back to Carty (2004)'s discussion of the franchise party ideal-type: party policy may be determined at different levels, leading to the possibility of convergence as well as contradictions across different levels of party organizations (13). Further complicating to this development is the fact that different regions enjoy varying degree of authority (Hooghe et al, 2016), resulting also in very strong and very weak regional party organizations.…”