Party Politics at the Local Level

Local governments have gained more autonomy (Ladner et al. 2019). They have become key government pillars dealing with complex policy problems that impact on people’s lives (Gendźwiłł et al. 2022). For parties, local government is a key arena in which to win elections, staff local executives, and influence policy. Nevertheless, party politics at the local level has not attracted abundant academic attention. At this level, we lack a comprehensive understanding on the structure of party competition, or of whether, and how local party politics differs from national-level party competition. The party system in each municipality differs from the national party system: each has its own mix of local branches of national parties and independent local lists (Copus et al. 2012; Otjes 2020). One of the largest challenges for the analytical study of party politics at the local level is a lack of data. Therefore, researchers have relied on surveys of local politicians (Bäck et al. 2006) or, more often, impressions rather than actual facts (Peters and Castenmiller 2018). We aim to move beyond the study of party politics based on impressions and perceptions to a systematic understanding of the interactions between parties at the local level. The increasing digitalization of local politics data, in combination with advances in web scraping and automated text analysis, opens exciting new avenues to understand local party politics. We can gain new insights by applying already existing theoretical approaches for the national level, and conceptualising specific characteristics of local politics. This Workshop aims to shed more light on the role of political parties in local politics. We focus on the interaction, competition and cooperation between them in the electoral and parliamentary spheres. The electoral arena Although parties are defined by their participation in elections, several aspects of local elections remain underdeveloped. Only recently, studies have started to examine the positions parties take in local manifestos (Gross and Jankowski 2020). Established theories of party competition, such as issue competition, do not yet play a role in the study of local party positioning. Local election campaigns have also attracted only marginal attention. Given that parties rely more strongly on volunteers at the local level, one might expect election campaigns to be less professionalized. However, fewer resources at the local level might also incentivize parties to use digital tools. The parliamentary arena Parties also structure work in local councils. The formation of local governments has received considerable attention in this regard (Serritzlew et al. 2010). However, policy-seeking strategies have not been systematically studied here (Debus and Gross 2016). Moreover, we still know very little about what happens once a local council is in session (Otjes et al. forthcoming). The most advanced literature here examines gender-related effects on local policymaking (Jung 2022). Studies have also linked the party composition of councils to policy outcomes, such as the budget (Maličká and Reis Mourao forthcoming). But the more nuanced measures of inter-party differences based on election manifestos have not yet been applied.