Parties, Institutions and Organizational Change: Quid Prius?

Since the second half of the XIX Century, political parties are the main political organizations competing to control the politico-administrative institutions. From a normative point of view, political parties play a double role: on the one hand they represent and promote, at institutional level, the plurality of issues raised from the civil society; on the other, they are the main actors in maintaining and reproducing the institutional order, in their vest of legislators and policy makers. Political parties are, at the same time, the representatives of the civil society and State institutionalization agencies. They help channelling the political conflict within the institutional framework, by promoting its foundational values and principles. As a reward, political parties are legitimated (de jure and/or de facto) by the State as the main actors of democratic representation: legitimacy is a fundamental factor, as it is reproduced and exchanged by institutions and organizations. The penetration of the State by political parties ran in parallel to a process of organizational autonomization of the party leadership and the party in public office, and to a corresponding decline of party presence within the civil society. The importance of parties as intermediate bodies between the civil society and the State has weakened, if not vanished, as well as the traditional organizational arrangements. The progressive disintermediation of politics has been characterized by the loss of centrality of party social linkages; on the contrary, party institutional incorporation – a synthetic measurement of the degree of penetration within the institutions – seems to represent a crucial variable to analyze the trajectories of party change in contemporary liberal-democracies. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether State legitimacy has become the main – if not the only – source of legitimacy of contemporary parties. By relying on the dataset provided by the PPDB project, this study analyses party organizations in 10 European democracies. While recent empirical analyses have confirmed the hypothesized ascendancy of the party in public office at the expenses of the party in central office and the party on the ground in all the major old parties (Bardi et al 2017), it seems useful to investigate more in-depth if also new parties – which are supposed to be less institutionally incorporated – have followed similar patterns or they have adopted different organizational templates.