The Changing Territoriality of Political Parties

Traditionally, parties have been analyzed as mobilizing members and voters across national territories. At least in Western democracies, this has been closely aligned with parties organizing through local branches spread across the same territory. However, in some ways, territoriality broadly conceived has become both more central and less central to parties’ operations, performance and, ultimately, survival. Due to developing processes of decentralisation and of continental integration, parties increasingly operate in multilevel settings, hence, across several territories with (at least somewhat) distinct identities. As research on multilevel parties and party competition has shown, this confronts parties with new organizational and coordination challenges both at the intra-state and supra-state levels. At the same time, the extent to which parties depend on an infrastructure physically covering a certain territory to organize or win elections is questioned by a growing literature on the role of new technologies to attract members and supporters, make internal decisions and reach voters, confronting parties with challenges and opportunities of ‘de-territorialization’. This section endorsed by the ECPR Standing Group on Political Parties welcomes panels and papers that assess the territorial dimension of parties along two broad themes: 1. The fragmentation of (national) territoriality: the rise of parties mainly organized/ focused on territorial units other than the national, hence, local, regional, European and international parties and party movements; community organizing and hyper-local campaigns; coordination challenges confronting state-wide parties increasingly pressed to bridge and reconcile demands from different territories and institutional arenas across which they operate (vertically and horizontally). 2. Superseding territoriality: the displacement of traditional party organization through digital technology, manifest in the growing use of non-territorially based modes of decision-making and communication in mainstream parties and the formation of new parties such as Pirates leading to discussions about new party models such as the ‘virtual party’ characterized by non-territorial forms of organization; parties developing an organization abroad facing the opportunity structure of overseas voting. These two developments raise major questions: How do they affect the decision-making process in parties and, in turn, feed into public policies, and governance? In the electoral arena, how do they affect parties’ campaign strategies and how does this, in turn, affect party competition and electoral choice? Do these two developments foster new forms of participation and representation within parties? Our section will feature both theoretical and empirical contributions, which will unpack the territorial dimension of political parties and party politics. We encourage panels and papers that question the challenges and consequences of the development of new, competing (non)-territorial arenas for party politics. We encourage panels and papers that investigate further whether certain parties are better equipped to cope with these challenges (the role of resources, types of organizations, party families, party age, etc.), and how these challenges affect parties differently. We welcome diverse approaches and methodologies, including conceptual, comparative and case study analyses as well as the employment of both qualitative and quantitative methods.