Political decentralisation and party organisational adaptation: a framework for analysis

The apparent 'denationalisation' of electoral politics in a number of western democracies, and the decentralising reforms adopted by a number of these democracies in recent years, necessitate a reevaluation of our understanding of the way political parties organise and compete in the electoral arena. The traditional view of party politics and party competition as essentially taking place at the national level between national parties over national issues appears increasingly inadequate to capture the dynamics of contemporary party democracy. Instead party scholars need to take on board what we could call the ‘territorial dimension’. In this paper I will suggest how this territorial dimension might affect the way parties organise, and offer a preliminary framework for orienting research into changing patterns of party organisation in a context of ‘denationalised’ party politics