Political Parties in Multi-Layered Systems

Abstract

The familiar language to describe and analyse the behaviour of political parties is -often only implicitly -a single-level language. That is not too surprising. Indeed, parties and party systems came into being as the result of a process of boundary closure, of the formation of national states and of a more or less simultaneous territorialization and democratization of politics. Major boundarycrossing societal conflicts were domesticated and consequently 'frozen' in national systems of partypolitical competition (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967;Bartolini, 1998;Flora et al., 1999).The institutional environment in which political parties have to function today, however, is becoming to an increasing extent, and in varying ways, multilayered. One of the reasons for this is the politicization of the European level of policy making. This has resulted in increased attention to public attitudes and thus voting behaviour in elections to the European Parliament. The increasing importance of the European Union has led to the labelling of the European system as 'multi-level' and to the rapid development of a wide body of research attempting to understand political activities and behaviour occurring in a system in which levels interact in complex ways. The literature on multi-level governance is, however, very much a party-free zone. The focus is on decision making and on implementation, and generally on non-party actors. One of the reasons for this is obviously the lack of real party politics at the European level. Even if the EU might be treated theoretically as one single -though multi-layeredpolitical system (Hix, 1999), the role of political parties in the EU remains rather limited. Probably the strongest argument against the idea that the EU can be seen as a political system that can be compared with other (national) systems is the absence of party politics and especially of party government.Analysis of European elections has nevertheless generated a number of interesting concepts and ideas that can be very useful in the search for a more general conceptual language for dealing with party activities in multi-layered systems. The notion of 'second-order elections', that was coined in direct reference to the first European elections, has found its way into more general and comparative approaches (Heath et al., 1999).A second reason for increasing attention to party Abstract ★ European Urban and Regional Studies 10(3): 213-226

Faccionalismo e integración vertical en contextos multinivel. El caso del Partido Nacionalista Vasco

“…En la última década, han proliferado varias investigaciones que tratan de explicar las causas de la variación encontrada en el grado de integración vertical, a menudo relacionándolo con el grado de descentralización del sistema polí-tico (Barnea y Rahat, 2007;Deschouwer, 2003;Hopkin, 2003;Hopkin y Van Biezen, 2006;Hough y Jeffery, 2006;Laffin, Shaw y Taylor, 2007), y son también varios los trabajos que, de entre los anteriores, se centran en partidos del sistema político español (Astudillo, en prensa;Betanzo, 2006;Méndez, 2004; Méndez y Orte, en prensa; Pérez-Nievas y Ramiro-Fernández, en prensa). Es cierto, sin embargo, que escasean los trabajos que consideren partidos de ámbito no estatal, si bien investigaciones más recientes han incorporado también a este tipo de partidos en el análisis, ya sea en exclusiva (Barberà, Sallas y Terrades, 2007), ya sea conjuntamente con partidos de ámbito estatal (Gómez, 2007).…”

Are the Europarties Real Political Parties? National Parties’ Involvement in Multi-level Structures of European Political Parties

“…The latter having been mainly presented in a study by Hepburn (2010). The relations between European and national party structures were noticed mostly by Deschouwer (2000Deschouwer ( , 2003Deschouwer ( , 2006.…”

“…In practice they pursue the second pattern and are created by domestic political parties, which are their members. A European political party should meet the following criteria: to have a legal personality in the EU member state in which its seat is located, to represent at least one quarter of member states (nowadays 7 of 28), to observe the principles on which the European Union is founded and to participate in the EP election or express the intention to do so (Regulation -EC -2004/2003.…”

“…The aim of the article is to fill this gap, therefore the relations between the national and European levels of party structures are here of special importance. The subject of the analysis are "political parties at the European level", considered as organizations that were lawfully acknowledged according to the EC regulation on Europarties (Regulation -EC -No 2004/2003 and which obtained grants from the EU budget in 2013 1 . The article was divided into three parts.…”

Latin American Traditional Parties, 1978-2006. Electoral Trajectories and Internal Party Politics, de Laura Wills-Otero

“…Tal vez la mayor cuestión pendiente no es en términos sustantivos, sino en el ambiente conceptual y relacionado con la literatura comparada sobre la organización interna de los partidos. Tal como el trabajo hace el mayor aporte en términos de operacionalización del concepto de estructura interna y codificación de los casos latinoamericanos de partidos tradicionales, el libro se hubiera beneficiado de un mayor diálogo con la literatura sobre la organización multinivel de los partidos políticos (Deschouwer, 2003(Deschouwer, , 2006Van Biezen & Hopkin, 2006). Esta literatura relativamente nueva en la ciencia política europea ofrece un marco teórico y analítico precisamente para comprender cómo está distribuido el poder dentro de los partidos y cómo se organizan estos entre los niveles del sistema de partidos y del sistema político en general.…”