Like Mother, Like Daughter? On the Relationship between the Local Chapter and the National Party Headquarters in Belgium

This paper aims to describe and explain the relationship between the local (i.e. municipal) chapter and its national (i.e. regional) headquarters as experienced by the local chairs of different parties in Belgium. Theoretically, it combines two angles emerging in the party literature. On the one hand, the perspective of parties as multilevel organizations focusing on internal territorial power relations and their consequences for the functioning of these organizations. On the other hand, the view that party structures have evolved from hierarchy to stratarchy as expressed in the ideal-type of the cartel party and the logic of the franchise-model conceived of in more contemporary assessments as a continuum with different factual levels of (de)centralization. The paper includes the hitherto often neglected local level therein. First, we aim to empirically describe the breath of territorial power relations. Thereby, we draw on three dimensions (with specified aspects for different faces and/or functions) often discerned in studies of parties as multilevel systems and adapted to the local-national dichotomy (and the extent to which these dimensions and their aspects are associated): - Vertical integration: extent and mode of linkage (or interdependence) in terms of structures (or organizations), resources (or services) and goals (or interests) between local chapters and the national headquarters; - Influence: extent to and way in which local chapters have an impact on the decisions of the national headquarters; - Autonomy: extent to and way in which local chapters have discretion towards the national headquarters (and in reverse, the sanctioning potential of the national headquarters vis-à-vis the local chapter). The paper draws on quantitative data gathered in the RepResent Local Chairs Survey 2018 (a project involving scholars from all universities in Belgium). It is targeted at the chairs of local chapters of national parties (i.e. those with a parliamentary presence) by means of a web-based survey (N = 648). The project provides a unique opportunity to study territorial power relations bottom-up (adopting a local lens) and informally (as perceived through the eyes of party chairs as key-informants). As such, it complements the top-down (national) and/or formal (statutory) perspective often adopted in the literature The RepResent Local Chairs Survey 2018 has the evident advantage of comparability between and within parties opening a second explanatory agenda of variation between our local chapters as prime units of analysis. Do the relations between the local chapter and its national headquarters predominantly differ according to the party (type) under consideration (one might think of the effect of party organizational origin or the family to which the party belongs)? Or is variation within a party equally significant and substantial (which can be associated with the characteristics of the specific chapter such as its preceding strength or institutionalization or strategic importance to the national headquarters or with the broader municipal party system or morphology)? Alternatively, to what extent do both points of reference reinforce or overwrite one another (and under which circumstances is this the case)?