Power-Sharing between Political Parties’ Regional and Local Levels: A Principal-Agent Approach

In this paper, I look into the effects of unwinnable elections on the organisation of, and distribution of power within political parties from an intra-organisational perspective. I use as a case study the British Liberal Democrats’ campaign for the Greater London Authority elections in 2021, an under-researched local election with a unique set of voting systems within British governance. This ethnographic study builds on nine months of participant observation within the London region party and more than 90 qualitative interviews conducted with key actors of the campaign assemblage (Nielsen, 2012) among which candidates, campaign staff and local party executives. Using a principal-agent framework (Kiewiet and McCubbins, 1991, Lupia and McCubbins, 2000, Van Houten, 2009, Enos and Hersh, 2015, Chewning et al., 2024), I look in particular at the cooperation and subversion dynamics at play between the regional level (to which authority over the campaign has been devolved by the national level and which thus acts as the principal), and the 31 local parties that make up the regional party in the capital, which act as agents. This approach allows me to shed light on the distribution of power within the party and on the challenges of the party’s post-coalition reconstruction that began in 2015. To do so, I look into three aspects of the campaign: the localisation of the party’s regional manifesto, the disputed choice of target wards, and the adoption of digital campaign practices. I show that despite the implementation, by the principal, of power-sharing over key decisions and incentive mechanisms to promote cooperative practices on the part of agents, we observe the emergence of centrifugal, subversive dynamics from local parties, in the form of agency costs and shirking. These arise from the unwinnable character of the election for the party, the importance given to the local level and to community politics in the party’s culture, its federal and decentralised structure, and its ideological commitment to individual freedom, as well as the different levels of development, resources, and diverging interests between local parties. Far from revealing a hierarchical organisation, the study of this campaign shows the shared and negotiated nature of power, the resistance and agency of grassroots activists, and the principal’s inability to use sanction mechanisms. We demonstrate that the party’s difficulties in unifying diverging short-term interests undermine the effectiveness of the campaign effort and, ultimately, its long-term common goal of national reconstruction.