Determinants of Parties’ Organisational Adaptation: Does the Distribution of Intra-Party Power Affect Parties’ Ability to Re-Distribute Organisational Resources when External Opportunities and Demands Change? Evidence from Finland 1983ꟷ2017

This paper examines political parties’ ability to adapt their organizations when external opportunities and demands, including the financial framework, change. Unlike the mass party era which was characterized by the wideness of organizational activities, contemporary publicly oriented, personalized, media-driven and leader-centric style of party politics asks for a centralized organization that strongly prioritizes professional media activities. I argue that party’s ability to move towards this ideal depends on the party’s internal distribution of power. The resistance the leadership faces when trying to optimize the organization relates to parties “genetic” features: the more activist-driven the party’s power distribution has been, the harder it is to change the organization into a modern “media agency”, because such ethos undermines the role of the mid-elite strata. I test the hypothesis with novel time series data on internal resource distribution (money, staff) of two Finnish parties that reflect polar ideal types in terms of intra-party power distribution. The parties have matured in a context, which has strongly pushed parties towards the “media agency” model. In addition to other factors, the legal terms for using public subsidies that make around 90 % of parties’ total income have gradually opened towards general media-centrism. Parties’ media subsidy, which comprises a half of the whole subsidy and was initially targeted exclusively to support party newspapers, can now be used free of any restrictions. The results show that the party that hails from public office dominated organizational tradition has fluidly adapted to ‘environmental’ pressures whereas the party that has more activist-driven roots has progressed much slower and still allocates a considerably larger share of its resources to traditional mass party tasks. The results suggest that changes in parties operating environment, especially the ones relating to parties’ finances, incentivize parties to re-arrange their organizations. However, organizationally ‘weak’ parties are able to use scarce resources more efficiently than ‘strong’ parties and thus they should be more competitive as organizations.