Rethinking the Relationships between Political Parties and the State

The relationships between political institutions and political parties have often been analyzed in dual terms. Yet, as Katz and Mair (1995) already noticed in their well-known (and criticized) article the clear separation of parties and political institutions has never been fully met in the evolution of liberal democracy. On the contrary, political institutions and parties are mutually linked. Parties act as agents of institutionalization, by reproducing and renewing the basis on which the institutional order underpins; at the same time, political institutions recognize parties as the legitimate actors of political representation, by conferring them public legitimacy. Political parties represent the plurality of the political orientations within a given polity and, at the same time, the keystone of the democratic institutions in their vest of decision makers and guarantors of institutional stability. In this perspective it is worth considering party organizational change as a process intertwined with institutional change. The aim of this Paper to investigate to what extent party organizational change ran in parallel to State organizational changes. By focusing on three European cases (United Kingdom, Germany and Italy), from 1960 to 2000, we expect that the timing of observed party organizational changes followed mainly the alternation of administrative paradigms, rather than socioeconomic and cultural modifications.