The Autonomy of European Subnational Party Branches: A Delegation Approach.

Processes of decentralization in Western Europe (and elsewhere) have increased the importance of the subnational political level. State-wide political parties have needed to adapt to this. In spite of various case studies and some recent conceptual work, we only have limited knowledge and understanding of the multi-level organization of political parties. This paper attempts to improve this situation by providing a delegation framework to study the interaction between the national leadership and regional branches in state-wide parties. It conceptualizes this interaction as a principal-agent relationship, in which the national leadership can obtain benefits from delegating tasks to the regional branch, but also faces possible costs in doing this. The rules and conventions regulating the multi-level interaction in parties can, then, be interpreted as mechanisms to control the actions and policies of regional branches. These rules and convention include formal party rules, informal party procedures and conventions, and state laws affecting party organizations. The possibility to endogenize these state laws is a particularly promising implication of this approach. This framework opens up a different perspective on multi-level dynamics in political parties than usually presented, and can serve as an agenda for future empirical research. This research should focus on crisis situations in parties and what regional branches cannot do, rather than simply documenting the autonomy of these branches in their everyday activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]