The Evolution of Political Organisations: Organisational Form, Function and Modes of Change

This workshop aims to gather scholars that focus on the evolution of a variety of political organizations, such as political parties, interest groups, social movements, non-profit and civil society organizations. While these particular types of organizations share fundamental communalities and challenges, such as the need to engage citizens and aggregate their demands, as well as the objective to shape public policy and public opinion, either directly or indirectly, they are often studied separately. This is the case despite social science research having highlighted the need to systematically analyse the relationships between these different organizations, as well as to conceptualise and study the evolution and behaviour of different types of voluntary organizations in comparison to each other (e.g. Kitschelt 1990; Goldstone 2003; Brunell 2005; Allern and Bale 2012; Bolleyer 2013; Beyers et al 2015; Bolger 2016; Farrer 2018; Fraussen and Halpin 2018; Heaney and Rojas 2015; Hutter et al 2016;). This growing body of work highlights that many insights can be gained by studying different types of political organizations in tandem. This workshop aims to build upon this knowledge by focusing specifically on the organizational form, function and modes of change of political organizations, thereby linking research in comparative politics, public policy, public administration and sociology. We conceptualize political organizations as self-governing, membership-based, voluntary organizations. In the context of the workshop, members are understood to be individual members (rather than other organizations), who can express their affiliation through various means (e.g. regular fee paying, organizational work and/or participation in events). Voluntary implies the constant right of (and from the organizational perspective threat of) individual exit of those members (Hirschman 1970; Wilson 1973). Political denotes a wide range of activities falling in the realm of both conventional and unconventional participation directed towards the political process both in the input and output stages, including activities such as recruiting political office-holders (parties), influencing political decision-makers to shape policy outcomes (interest groups), shaping societal discourse and awareness and thereby political agenda-setting (movement organizations) and shaping policy outputs by involvement in policy delivery (organizations with strong service components). This broad-ranging conceptualization of a political organization allows us to put centre-stage the tensions between internal demands of members and attempts of the leadership to achieve central organizational goals, dynamics important to assess in a period of increased societal individualization, accompanied by disaffection with formal electoral politics, political elites as well as conventional forms of participation (Lawson and Merkl 1988; Andeweg 2003; Dalton and Weldon 2005). Naturally we find bodies of work dealing with how organizations such as parties, interest groups and movement organizations organize and develop respectively. Yet the study of opportunity structures and institutional context has been more prominent than research on intra-organizational dynamics, especially when it comes to comparative cross-national studies. How organizational elites and activists build, shape and transform different types of political organization over time to assure the attainment of (possibly changing) goals, while surviving as collective actors, has been much less in the centre of attention. To date, many of these issues have only been insufficiently addressed due to the still influential divides between and within disciplines. To encourage research on different political organizations that is more tightly integrated and move this research agenda forward, this workshop invites papers that address one (or multiple) of the following three themes: choice of organizational form, choice of organizational function, and modes of change. THEME 1: CHOICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL FORM One fundamental question in the study of organizations is whether latent societal interests can be mobilized at all. This stage of organizational evolution is often overlooked due to a tendency to focus on the existing organizational landscape. Though we find some insightful research on party, group and movement formation (Blee 2012; Halpin 2014: chapter 5; Hug 2001; Tavits 2006; Young 2010; Zons, 2013), as the different types of political organizations tend to be studied in isolation, they are rarely approached as alternative forms of organizing from the perspective of political entrepreneurs keen to represent certain types of issues in the political arena (but see Farrer 2018). This leaves open the question which organizational form (e.g. movement, party, interest group) is chosen by such entrepreneurs to represent a particular constituency or to advance certain issues? Do certain issues lend themselves to particular forms, or are certain forms more effective depending on an organizations’ institutional environment? Instead of taking the “group landscape” or party system as the point of departure, starting from particular constituencies or societal interests, it is evident that they can associate and mobilize politically in a great variety of forms (Fraussen and Halpin 2018). This constituency-oriented perspective raises the question what set of organizations is involved with the articulation of a given set of interests and why. Put differently, how are similar constituencies (e.g. farmers, or environmentalists) represented or given a political voice by different types of political organizations (e.g. parties, groups, non-profits, service groups)? This perspective is broadly evident through work on the US context charting the emergence of specific ways of organizing politically (Clemens, 1997) and more specific studies of organizational forms, for instance consumer groups (Rao, 1998). To fully understand the reasons why particular organizational forms are chosen, however, we need studies that systematically assess and compare a variety of organizational repertoires to each other as well as across different country settings. THEME 2: CHOICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL FUNCTION Which organizational forms and structures go with which functions? We know surprisingly little about why membership organizations go political in the first place (e.g. from latent interest group or inwards orientated citizen group to actual interest group) or re-orientate themselves to sustain support through non-political activities instead, downplaying or fully exiting politics (e.g. from interest group to service provider). Considering the interest group literature, for instance, whether firms – whose primary function is the making of economic profit – become lobbyists or not constitutes a puzzle and has been actively discussed (e.g. De Figueiredo & Kim, 2004; Drutman 2015). What motivates voluntary membership organizations to become interest groups in a political sense, in contrast, has rarely been examined (Schlozman 2010: 5; but see Anderson et al 2004; Bolleyer and Weiler forthcoming). This is because interest group populations (unlike firms) are commonly defined by their political activity, with supposedly ‘non-political’ groups excluded from the outset. As interest groups’ engagement in political activity is considered closely tied to their raison d’être (Lowery, 2007), most emphasis has been on the strategies through which groups try to exercise political influence (e.g. Beyers, 2004; Binderkrantz, 2008; Dür & Mateo, 2013). As a result, less effort has been devoted to studying whether and how intensely voluntary membership groups engage in political activities (hence transition from ‘group’ to ‘interest group’ status) in the first place. Once organizations are politically active, a key question involves how political organizations with different intra-organizational structures and characteristics engage with the state in general and policymakers in particular, an issue that has received surprisingly little attention (but see Tresch and Fischer 2015 for a rare exception). To what extent do we find differences in the policy engagement across political organizations, or observe variation in how they legitimate their policy advocacy (Fraussen and Halpin 2018)? Do some forms result in different processes of issue prioritization, or the adoption of more radical or consensual policy positions (Halpin et al. 2018)? What is the link between organizational form and particular functions, such as (a relative) emphasis on agenda setting, campaigning, providing services to members or the provision of policy expertise through formal institutional channels (such as expert groups and advisory councils)? And how are such external political activities linked to intra-organizational professionalization on the one hand and member involvement and policy influence on the other, two dimensions of organization that are often perceived as being in tension with each other, by parties as well as group scholars (Mair et al. 2004; Poguntke and Webb 2005; Maloney 2009; Billis 2010)? THEME 3: MODES OF CHANGE: ADAPTATION, HYBRIDISATION, TRANSFORMATION This third theme focuses on organizational trajectories and examines how political organizations change over time considering the full spectrum of change, which can be more or less radical, ranging from adaptation (change within the ‘same organizational form’) over hybridisation (combining aspects of distinct organizational forms) to transformation – moving from one form to the other (e.g. from movement to party or interest group). Some organizations overcome the challenges associated with internal shocks such as leadership transition, or external shocks like a decline in resources due to economic recession, through adaptation, by changing their organizational structures or strategies (e.g. Fraussen 2014). Others can change through transformation, meaning a fundamental shift in their functional orientation, i.e. a movement organization might develop into a fully-fledged political party or an interest group into a service-provider (e.g. Schwartz 2005; Jordan and Halpin 2003). Such transformations raise the question under which conditions this mode of change is more likely to emerge as compared to less radical forms of change. It also raises questions about the conceptual boundaries of transformation itself: to what extent should we talk about a transformed organization rather than the emergence of a new organization built on the remnants of a declined or defunct one and how do we treat processes of hybridisation? Recent work on social movements and non-profits also emphasizes that rather than moving from one form to another or making gradual adjustments, political entrepreneurs creatively recombine elements from different organizational models to respond to varying demands from actors in their environment, or different institutional logics, processes that are still too little understood. (e.g.Minkoff 2002; Hasenfeld & Gidron 2005; Goss and Heaney, 2010; Almong-Bar & Schmid 2014; Skelcher and Smith, 2015). BIOGRAPHIES OF DIRECTORS Bert Fraussen is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs at Leiden University. Previously, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (ANU). He obtained his PhD at the University of Antwerp, Department of Political Sciences (Belgium). Bert is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Antwerp Centre for Institutions and Multilevel Politics (ACIM) and the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIR) at the Australian National University. His research agenda integrates the organizational design and development of political organizations, notably interest groups, and their involvement in public policy. His work has been published in journals such as Governance, European Journal of Political Research, Public Administration and Political Studies. Nicole Bolleyer is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Exeter. She studied at the University of Mannheim, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and did her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence. She is based at in Exeter since 2007 but held research fellowships at the University of Leiden, the University of Cologne and the European University Institute. Nicole is the author of ‘Intergovernmental Cooperation’ and ‘New Parties in Old Party Systems’ (both Oxford University Press) and her work appeared in journals such as the Journal of Politics, European Journal of Political Research, Governance, Political Studies, Party Politics and the European Political Science Review. She currently runs the ERC-project ‘Regulating Civil Society’ (STATORG) which assesses the nature and consequences of legal frameworks adopted by long-lived democracies to steer organized civil society covering parties, interest groups and service-providing membership organizations. Her third monograph ‘Civil Society and the State’ based on this research is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. REFERENCES Allern, E.H. and Bale, T. (2012). Political Parties and Interest Groups: Disentangling Complex Relationships’. Party Politics 18 (1): 7-25. Almong-Bar, M., & Schmid, H. (2014). Advocacy activities of nonprofit human service organizations: A critical review. 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