Political Parties in Multilevel States: Origins, Social Bases, and Strategies

Abstract

Political parties remain a crucial set of agents of democratic politics. Despite talks about their decline, they remain the most fundamental actors shaping political discourse and public policy, selecting candidates and filling legislative and executive positions. In multilevel states, they can also influence politics and policy at the sub-state level. At this level, they can shape public policy, select candidates, run for election, recruit members, and mobilise voters on issues that may be different from those that dominate statewide politics. By emphasising different issues, they may end up shaping the overall structure of the state by placing demands for further autonomy, the reorganisation of the state, and the redistribution of policy competencies along territorial lines. The papers in this panel represent a variety of perspectives on political parties in multilevel states. They discuss party formation in Catalonia, party identification in Germany, party membership at the local level in the Czech Republic, and party strategies and issue salience in Scotland and in a comparative perspective.