Branches on the line: Mapping the decline of the party on the ground

Parties and citizens are said to have mutually withdrawn from their zones of engagement towards the end of the twentieth century. However, the information provided by parties, which has been used to theorize about party organizational change, presents a number of issues. First, it is acknowledged by researchers to often be unreliable. Second, it largely concerns the "demand" side of the party on the ground, that is, grassroots memberships, rather than the "supply" side: local branches. Third, since it consists of national-level data, it does not tell us about the geography of the party on the ground’s alleged fall. In this paper, we address these issues by mapping the location of party branches over time using an unobtrusive method that does not rely on data from the parties. Specifically, we use phone directories to track local branches of the three electorally strongest parties in Italy and Sweden between 1960 and the early 2000s. Our analysis reveals that the number of what we call "resourced branches" (with a telephone) in both countries grew until the second half of the 1980s, before falling in the 1990s. It also shows though that these national-level results mask divergent centre-periphery and rural-urban trends. Our findings shed light on the extent to which the mutual disengagement of people and parties on the ground was indeed mutual and how this disengagement had specific geographical characteristics.