Suchergebnisse

Vertical integration is an important concept for political parties. In multi-level or federal contexts, it is said to affect party strength, national integration and federal stability. Despite this, difficulties with the conceptualization and operationalization of vertical integration and a lack of cross-national data impede research. This article clarifies the concept of vertical integration, distinguishing it from related concepts of strength, centralization and autonomy and distinguishing the indicators of integration from the effects of integration. It introduces the measures of vertical integration and autonomy used in the Party Organization in Multi-Level Systems (POMLS) dataset comprising data from survey responses from 204 state-level parties in eight countries. The data confirm the theoretical distinctions among forms of vertical integration and between vertical integration and autonomy and show that not all forms of vertical integration are mutually reinforcing.

In this article, I develop three measures of party organization in multi-level systems: vertical integration, influence and autonomy. I assess these in 27 parties in Canada, Australia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the United States and Spain and investigate how parties respond to the incentives and opportunities created by their institutional environment. Clear patterns emerge between the form of federal state design and the predominant form of party organization: in decentralized federations with low coordination requirements between federal and state-level governments, a tendency can be found towards highly autonomous state parties. Where resources are centralized and intergovernmental coordination requirements are high, integrated parties with low autonomy can be found. However, neither aspect of institutional design has a significant relationship with `upward' influence of state-level parties in the governance structure of federal parties.