Party Organization

Historical Evolution

In a historical-institutionalist perspective, understanding party organization requires an analytical reconstruction of each political party's origin and specific institutionalization. The features of parties' organizations depend on past history: how the organizations originated and how they consolidated. Path dependency rules explain why every organization, and political parties too, bears the mark of its origin and consolidation (institutionalization) even several decades later. Reconstructing the genetic model (Angelo Panebianco, 1988) of political parties means considering three elements:

• 1.
  The organizational development: The birth of a party can be due to territorial penetration or territorial diffusion, or their combination. Penetration means that a “center” organizes, controls, and directs the development of a territorial “periphery.” Diffusion means that party organization is the product of the aggregation/federation of previous local groups and elites. In the first case, the party will probably become a strong, centralized organization controlled by a unified central oligarchy. In the second case, the party will be a decentralized organization with many diversified and competing groups: a stratarchy, as described by Samuel Eldersveld in 1964, in which every subgroup fights for power, making precarious and instable compromises with other subgroups.
• 2.
  The presence or absence of an external sponsor of an institution (a church, trade unions, the Comintern) as actual founder of the party: If an external sponsor exists, the party is its “political weapon.” The external sponsor is the main center of loyalties and identifications for party followers and members as well as the source of legitimation for party leaders. Therefore, externally legitimated parties (confessional parties, labor parties, communist parties) and internally legitimated parties can be distinguished. This circumstance will influence all aspects of the future organizational developments.
• 3.
  The presence or absence of a charismatic leader as founder of parties: Charismatic parties have very special features. The leader holds the full [Page 1818]control of the party's dominant coalition. He or she is the de facto owner of the party.

The characteristics of the genetic model influence the manner of institutionalization, the process of structural consolidation of parties. Institutionalization is the process by which an organization incorporates its founder's values and aims, by which it becomes an institution—develops boundaries, an internal career system, a consolidated hierarchy, and a professionalized leadership. Two ideal types can be distinguished: strong institutionalization and weak institutionalization. Strong institutionalization means high autonomy from the environment and high interdependencies and coherence among its internal components. Weak institutionalization means low external autonomy and a low degree of internal interdependence. In the first case, the party will be a centralized, bureaucratic, organization led by a strong central oligarchy. It will hold the control of many external organizations (unions, interest groups, etc.), and it will adopt an aggressive, expansionist, policy toward the external environment.

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