Branches on the line: Mapping the rise and fall of the party on the ground

The decline of political parties as mass organisations has been much discussed within the context of party withdrawal from zones of engagement with citizens. However, the data provided by parties about their organisations, which scholars use to make these claims, is acknowledged by those same scholars as frequently unreliable. In this paper, we assess the presence of parties on the ground over time using an unobtrusive method. Specifically, we use phone directory archives to gather data on the presence of local party branches of the three electorally strongest parties in Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden between 1960 and the early 2000s. Our analysis reveals that the total number of branches in all three countries grew until the second half of the 1980s, before then falling in each throughout the rest of the period. We then illustrate an application of our new dataset by looking at whether the presence of party branches affected electoral performances. This produces mixed results, suggesting that there is not always a direct link between having an office in a town and gaining votes at elections.