Despite increasing sophistication in its analysis of federalism and its correlates (federalized party systems, decentralization, and the like) and a renewed interest in comparative state and local politics, political science still lacks the analytic tools necessary for understanding the politics of place. Research on political parties is indicative: While parties and party systems have received considerable attention since the Third Wave, scholars in that research program have often assumed that parties are spatially fixed: they are analyzed as national-level organizations, complicated by competing factions and interests, but spatially invariant across the national territory; and when state or regional parties and party systems do receive attention, they are treated as independent of one another, not interdependent with each another. This paper outlines a spatially-sensitive framework for the analysis of party organizations – one that is grounded in location, locale, and sense of place; one that while focused on the local level incorporates causal dynamics across scales; and one that examines the relationship between places within a single scale. The result is a place-based theory of party organization. After advancing this analytic framework, this paper examines the cases of Mexico’s National Action Party and Germany’s Christian-Democratic Union to demonstrate the value-added of a spatially-sophisticated approach to the study of parties and political science.
