Bringing the Party Back In – Parties as Constitutionalised Organisation

Parties have an exceptional, typically constitutional status in most advanced democracies and are therefore special voluntary organisation. Thus, the inquiry to analyse parties’ relations to the state is not merely how states and parties influence each other. Of central interest for the suggested paper is what ensues from this mutual connection and how these reciprocal interrelations can be best analysed. Given that party-state independence occurs, an integrative perspective on party-state interactions is required, embedded in meta-processes such as mediatisation or globalisation. This bridges the disconnected literature of intermediate organisations’ relations to the state and leads to the following hypothesis: When looking at parties’ adaptations to their changed environment not parties’ responses to state interventions are primarily but the incorporation of governmental processes and institutions into parties’ organisational structure are assumed as a “constitutionalisation” of parties. This incorporation will be exploratory analysed by integrating both perspectives of the state and the parties. The herein suggested framework includes parties’ institutionalisation as well as it refers to boundary dissolutions of national processes in the context of globalisation or European integration. Following this, a multidimensional consideration of national and supranational concerns of parties as “interlocutors” between the society and the state is needed. Parties then function as boundary translation agencies into at least two directions: First, between the “bottom” (society) and the “top” (governmental institutions) and second the repercussions resulting from this. Independent variables are then the political system, the parties, and external transformative processes such as globalisation or mediatisation. Dependent variables are the influenced and influencing governments, parliaments and legislation. An exploration to demonstrate the framework is the anticipation of governments’ requests by German political parties in social policy using own qualitative and CMP data. Therefore the proposed paper develops and tests a conceptual framework that allows analysing party-state-relations in advanced democracies.