Integrating Multi-Level Party Politics from the Ground Up: The Local Organizations of Canada’s Liberal Parties

Please do not cite without permission. 1All statewide parties in decentralized states will have to accommodate inter-territorial tensions over the distribution of resources, manage the relationship between party officials and representatives of various tiers of government, and speak for the ‘general ’ interest whilst simultaneously representing potentially contradictory ‘particularistic ’ interests. But these contradictions are likely to be much stronger in heterogeneous societies where strong ethnoregionalist parties are present. (van Biezen and Hopkin 2006) Just how do political parties manage the organizational tensions involved in multi-level politics? Van Biezen and Hopkin (2006, 15) are surely correct in identifying this as one of the critical problems of such systems and in noting that this is a particularly difficult problem when the basis for democratic multi-level structures lies in the conflicts inherent in ethnically divided societies where the constituent communities command their own space. To explore this problem van Biezen and Hopkin analyze three key accommodative strategies – nomination, electoral and governing – that parties in Spain and the United Kingdom adopt. In both cases the decentralized political institutions (i.e. the basis for multi-level politics) were new and the comparison led t