Toward a place based theory of party organization
Steven Wuhs, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Government, University of Redlands
Humboldt Fellow, Technische Universität-Dresden
[email protected]
Paper prepared for delivery at the annual meeting of the European Consortium for
Political Research, Reykjavik, Iceland, August 2011. Please do not cite without author’s
permission. Comments very welcome.
Introduction1
Political parties are essential vehicles for the operation of representative democratic
systems. In such systems, they perform a wide range of tasks that contribute to the
quality of democracy – organizing and aggregating interests in society, forging linkages
with associations in civil society, mobilizing voters at election time, cueing voters
through their labels in Election Day booths, and structuring the work of legislatures. The
list can go on indefinitely, actually, since it is difficult to imagine representative
democracy as anything other than a party-based democracy. Because of the centrality of
parties to democratic systems, political scientists have spent a lot of time trying to
understand their origins, their internal operations, their relative strengths, their
membership, and the like.
Most typically, those studies are conducted at the national scale, because until recently
regime types and democratic attributes of a political system have also been considered
principally at the national level. However, while parties are certainly influenced by state
structure, it is not clear that pegging the analysis of party organizations to how we
understand the state yields optimal results. For that reason, some scholars have recently
begun to examine subnational party systems and party organizations. This is a step in the
right direction, but for the most part this scholarship is also predicated on state structure
(chiefly, federalism and decentralization).
In this paper I demonstrate the empirical limitations of traditional, national-scale
approaches to the analysis of party organizations and explore the limits of the regional
party systems literature. Borrowing from the fields of political and electoral geography, I
then advance a spatial approach to the study of parties based on the work those
organizations perform in representative democratic systems. I demonstrate the valueadded of that approach with data from the cases of two parties, Germany’s Christian
Democratic Union and Mexico’s National Action Party.
1
The author thanks the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Small Grant program of the American
Political Science Association, the Faculty Research Grant program of the University of Redlands for their
support of the research behind this project.
2 Literature Review: Territorial Parties and Politics
The politicization of class cleavages between agrarian and bourgeois classes, and then
between workers and owners, nationalized politics in western Europe by overshadowing
the significance of earlier cleavages (like the center-periphery one) that had more
apparent geographic content (Caramani 2004, 19). National-level cleavages then
structured patterns of competition among parties for much of the postwar period (Lipset
and Rokkan 1967; Bartolini and Mair 1985; Dix 1989). While those “frozen” systems
have since thawed following new challenges from the radical right and the postmaterialist
left (among others), political attention has remained, on the whole, quite focused on
national-level politics. This emphasis was compounded over time by the increasing
power of national media, the decline of traditional partisanship, and the rise of candidatecentered politics in the advanced industrialized countries (e.g., Watternberg 1994).
Unsurprisingly, many of the key studies of party organization and party systems are thus
national-level stories, from the theoretical to the empirical in orientation (Panebianco
1988; Shefter 1994; Duverger 1964; Coppedge 1994; Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Keck
1995; Kitschelt 1989; Levitsky 2003; Roberts 2002; Van Cott 2005). While many of
these works include local case studies, they are most often designed to demonstrate
theoretical arguments formulated at the national scale; in the end, the backdrop to most of
these party studies is the character of national-level democratic rule.
Studies of Mexican democratization are illustrative. In the run-up to the 2000 transitional
election and in the years since, scholars produced works devoted to explaining the
emergence of the leftist PRD (Bruhn 1997; Greene 2007; Wuhs 2008), the
transformations in the PRI (Langston 2002, 2003), and the transformation of the rightist
PAN (Loaeza 1999; Mizrahi 2003; Shirk 2005; Greene 2007; Wuhs 2008). All of the
authors are particularly interested in the national-level implications of party development;
that is, after all, where the 2000 transition occurred. It had subnational dimensions, of
course – many of these authors have local case study content, and other volumes
specifically highlighted the transition’s subnational content (Rodriguez and Ward 1995;
3 Cornelius et al. 1999). But studies of local party development and change were 1) used
to demonstrate arguments developed at the national scale, and 2) were not comprehensive
across the universe of subnational cases (most of which operated at the state, not the
local, level).
For example, in my own work (Wuhs 2008), I used the tools of historical institutionalism
to explain the processes through which Mexico’s historic, pro-democratic opposition
parties (the rightist PAN and the leftist PRD) developed from their respective foundations
in 1939 and 1989. I argued that the organizations were imprinted with distinct
conceptions of democracy at their establishment, and that those democratic concepts
infused the institutions that governed internal life, and subsequently conditioned how the
parties responded to Mexico’s political liberalization. Specifically, I examined how the
parties’ candidate selection procedures, professionalization of their operations, and their
linkage strategies reflected their foundational ideals, and how well they positioned the
parties to take advantage of democratic opening.
The trick is that while Mexico’s democratic transition in 2000 was a national-level affair
and the PAN and PRD national party organizations, the story of their institutional
development, from their foundations (in 1939 and 1989), to their experiences under PRI
authoritarianism, to their consolidation as electorally-oriented parties, played out at the
local, regional, and national levels. For example, the PAN’s central party office in
Mexico City crafted linkage strategies, but they were deployed with local actors in
particular constituencies, with particular electoral goals in mind. Likewise, the PRD and
PAN’s national leaderships took control of state and local party organizations on their
national institutional prerogative, but their goals were profoundly local. That is, my own
national-level bias (a function of my concern with the transition) may have made sense in
the context of an analysis of democratic transition, but it neglected very clear reality that
party organizations and their institutions are cross-scalar in their historical presence and
their effects.
The global trend toward decentralization and federalization offered some remedy to the
national-level bias in the study of parties. This reconfiguration of the territorial
organization of states, transferring political and fiscal authority from national
4 governments to regional governments, altered the incentive structures of political parties
by increasing the value of control of subnational governments.2 Following those reforms,
some parties became increasingly territorialized and drew the attention of scholars. For
example, statewide parties refocused their attention on winning subnationally, and
ethnoregionalist parties emerged or were emboldened to try to claim regional power
(Hopkin 2009; Jeffery and Hough 2003; Maddens and Swenden 2008).
Decentralization also introduced regional variations in parties and party systems. One
important change resulting from decentralization is a decrease in the nationalization of
the party system, or the extent to which parties are competitive throughout their national
territory (Harbers 2010, 18; Klesner 2007, 2005; Jones and Mainwaring 2003). Indeed, it
seems that nationalization of politics was less fixed or frozen than many believed.3
During periods of political centralization, party systems grew more nationalized, but even
prior to the decentralization wave of the 1980s, when subnational governments grew
more powerful in relative terms, party systems responded by regionalizing (Chhibber and
Kollman 2004).4 The decreasing nationalization of party systems has placed new
emphasis on what patterns of competition for subnational office look like (what Harbers
2010 calls the subnational party system), and how they relate to the national-level party
politics. What has emerged in many countries is a multi-level party system (Swenden
and Maddens 2009) or a federalized party system (Gibson and Suarez-Cao 2007),
wherein significant differences in patterns of party competition occur between national
and regional levels, and wherein significant differences are also evident across
subnational regions. Conceptually speaking, the pie charts below elucidate what statistics
like the Effective Number of Parties, Party System Nationalization Scores (Jones and
2
Truman 1962, 123 notes that federalism, for example, “creates separate, self-sustaining centers of power,
privilege, and profit which may be sought and defended as desirable in themselves.” Quoted in Harbers
2010.
3
I will leave aside here the fact that in Latin America party systems were significantly less cleavage-based
with only a couple of exceptions, so cleavage structures are unlikely to have conditioned party system and
party organization nationalization. Instead, the likely culprit is the region’s long history of political
centralization.
4
This highlights basic debates in comparative politics about whether cleavage structures or institutions are
the primary determinants of party system structure.
5 Mainwaring 2003), or the Index of Dissimilarity (Jeffery and Hough 2003) measure with
greater specificity.5
Yet while multi-level politics has introduced new dynamics into party systems and party
organizations and offered a window through which we might consider the fragmentation
and disarticulation of parties and party systems below the national level, significant
questions linger about the organization of political parties that raise further questions
about how and where we should best study them. Most centrally, is a regional
perspective appropriate, or even adequate? The multi-level governance/parties literature
operates at a relatively high level of resolution – the regional level, where
decentralization relocates political authority. Those regions may be more important
politically following decentralizing reforms, but it is not clear that the regional level is
where citizens identify with parties, or where parties “reside” in terms of a meaningful
organizational presence.
Alternatively, the local scale offers crucial perspectives on several key elements of party
organization. For example, scholars often point to two processes through which parties
established a territorial presence (penetration and diffusion, from Panebianco 1988).
5
Figure created by author, but Harbers 2010 presents similar intuitive graphics. Harbers (2010, 30)
demonstrates that the party organizations that compose the party system also change in response to
decentralizing reforms – growing territorially segmented as regional organization have more freedom to
make their own decisions.
6 However, we know precious little about how those dynamics, which are by definition
local processes, unfold on the ground aside from a handful of case studies (Lewis 1994;
Perepechko et al. 2010; Stoner-Weiss 2007). Our narratives of party formation are often
actor-centered stories that unfold without sufficient attention to their territorial
dimensions. For example, again from my own work, I discuss the PAN’s foundation in
1939 in Mexico City. True, that is where the party founded; but after their initial
meeting, the founders returned to their home states and districts across Mexico to try to
establish it as a civic force. How did they do that work? What networks, tactics, and
alliances did they employ? Did similar processes unfold across different regions of
Mexico, or was there significant local variation?
Among established parties, scholarly attention has often focused on party
institutionalization and party-system institutionalization because of their effects on
democratic consolidation. Overall this scholarship tends to operate at the national level
due to its emphasis on theory development and cross-national comparison (Mainwaring
and Scully 1005; Mainwaring and Torcal 2005; Randall and Svåsand 2002; Dalton 2007;
Kuenzi and Lambright 2001), though the subnational party systems literature noted has
highlighted important implications for interest representation and quality of democracy.
However, there is important local content here. Take, for example, a measure of party
institutionalization like systemness (defined as “the increasing scope, density, and
regularity of the interactions that constitute the party as a structure” in Randall and
Svåsand 2002, 13; see also Levitsky 2003). It is simply not possible to observe this idea
of systemness without doing so locally - which Levitsky does to some extent, to be fair.
Beyond the quality of operationalization, local party structures are important because
they contribute to party institutionalization problems and disparate electoral performance
between contests, over time, and across space (e.g., Grabowski 1996, 215).
Likewise, party system institutionalization, so crucial to democratic consolidation
processes, hinges on how parties establish their roots in society via alliances and linkages
of varied types. The implications of weak party system institutionalization are typically
argued and documented at the national scale – erratic election outcomes, weak
accountability of elected officials to voters, and the like – and they are certainly grave.
7 This particular element of party system institutionalization (stable roots) is often times
operationalized as the consistency of platform and issue positions, or even as party age
(Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Kuenzi and Lambright 2001). This seems like a poor
operationalization of the underlying idea, that parties within a system should have
segments of the population that identify meaningfully with them, driven perhaps by a
desire for comparative analysis rather than a valid measure of ties between parties and
voters. Those ties, while influenced by national-level politics (for example, by the
historical alliances between labor-based parties and union confederations), the media, and
other factors, also seem likely to reflect the work of parties at the local level (see, for
example, Agnew 2002 on party subcultures in Italy).
It is also clear that the local level matters politically, its implications for national politics
aside. We recognize that voters’ local environments shape their ballot-box choices
(Hiskey and Bowler 2005, though many cites could be added here). Likewise, we know,
for example, that voters are unlikely to support parties that are not present in the
communities (Wilson 2008), and that the strength of local party can influence election
outcomes (especially gubernatorial and local ones) and a party’s ability to successfully
recruit candidates (Gibson et al. 1985; Frendreis, et al. 1990, 230). Studies of clientelism
(so central to party politics in many contexts) likewise highlight how localized those
processes are (Selee 2012; Holzner 2010; Montero forthcoming).
If party and party-system institutionalization, strong partisan roots in society, and strong
voter attachments to parties, are so crucial for politics and representative democracy, then
we need to study them where citizens join parties and where partisan identities are
formed, and where parties relate to local communities and their histories. Doing so adds
significant complexity to how we understand party organization, but a bottom-up
approach that incorporates the local level can also offer new perspectives on the problems
that parties encounter across scales, over time, and across space.
8 Toward a place-based theory of party organization
Politics is conditioned by place. Place, according to Agnew (2002) is composed of three
elements: location, or the physical coordinates of a setting; locale, or the setting in which
normal life occurs for a group of people (itself quite multidimensional in content); and
sense of place, the significance that inhabitants of that setting attach to it. Place, then, is
where citizens experience politics; it is the environment that shapes their values and
beliefs and behavior. That is, it is also where they form their preferences (Agnew 2002,
14). For example, in the rougher, more mountainous terrain of northern Italy, isolated
communities were forced to develop collective ways of managing their affairs in order to
protect themselves from external threats (Putnam 1993). The physical topography of the
land itself may matter for how people organize politically. “Adjacency effects” are also a
function of location. Some, for example, credit proximity to Western Europe for the
successes of the central European countries’ (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic)
transitions to democracy and capitalism relative to their easterly neighbors (Kopstein and
Reilly 2005). Likewise, the locale that one inhabits affects one’s political beliefs and
behavior. These are often operationalized in political science as contextual or
neighborhood effects, and are standard-issue variables in quantitative analyses of voting
behavior (urbanization, levels of municipal development, income levels; Hiskey and
Bowler 2005). That said, they typically underspecify place (e.g., by assuming that
9 neighboring municipalities are assumed independent of one another); the scale (or level
of analysis) is sometimes poorly considered; and sometimes dummy variables produce
puzzling, undertheorized findings.6 Historical legacies and senses of place also exert
clear influence on politics: The post-socialist states of Eastern Europe are marked by
legacies of totalitarianism and state socialism in their civic communities, their welfare
states, and their foreign policies, in addition to the structure of their political parties
(Ekiert and Hanson 2005, among many others). Indeed, as Tobler’s First Law of
Geography states, near things are more related than are far things – suggesting that the
world is marked by geographic effects.
Moving from politics to parties. Accepting that politics operates in a complex spatial
context marked by layers of historical legacies, civic culture and demography, and
economy, and conditioned or potentially conditioned by geographic phenomena like
adjacency and scale, in this section I work through the logic of introducing a geographic
perspective on party organization. Conventional approaches do not allow for an analysis
of parties with the same complexity. If politics is this spatially marked, then parties (so
central to how politics is organized under representative democracy) must also be spatial.
My intent here is to articulate an approach to the study of parties that allows for the
multidimensionality of place, the effects of adjacency on politics, and the embeddedness
6
As Shin (2001 332-3) notes, when neighborhood effects are analyzed they are normally measured at “the
finest spatial resolution for which voting data is available.” We typically regard that as good methodology:
doing so increases our sample size and allows us to get closer to the voters as they cast their ballots.
However, what if the scale is wrong? Contextual effects on an individual’s vote choice should be
substantively significant, not just statistically significant. For that to hold, the scale at which analysis
occurs should “fit” with how that individual conceives of himself as a political-geographic actor. Does the
voter identify with his precinct’s or county’s average GDP per capita? In the case of undertheorized
dummy variables, studies of voting behavior in contemporary Mexico typically produce some statistically
significant regional effects, even when controlling for variables like wealth, education, and other standards.
A clear case from this literature would be the Bajío effect, where the region of central-western Mexico by
that name typically supports the Partido Acción Nacional. But why? Are voters somehow socialized to
consider themselves “from the Bajío”? Is there an underlying commonality across the states that make up
the region that drives the observed effect? Likewise, in the very different field of candidate selection
procedures, Scandivanian countries were found to use particularly open processes to name their candidates
for office, across parties and across the region (Lundell 2001). The conclusion is that there is something
particular about Scandinavia – exactly what is unclear, though. In this case, place may well be significant,
but at best due to a regional exceptionalism that we do not understand, and at worst because of an omitted
variable bias that somehow overlaps with regional boundaries. Agnew 2002, 21 confirms many of these
arguments, noting the individual bias in these studies (and a related ecological inference problem) in
addition to the scalar problems noted above.
10 of particular localities in larger scalar forms, like regions and states. I thus suggest that
the study of parties needs to recognize the heterogeneity that exists among localities, the
political commonalities and interrelationships across those localities, and the influence of
external forces on those localities – in addition to the critical junctures that parties
experience developmentally. This is thus a call for developing an analytical complexity
that matches the empirical complexity of local party organizations, in light of their
importance to the representative content of contemporary democracy.
Conception of parties as spatial. If parties are spatial, they can be observed and
measured in place and geographical terms. Not all parties are equally spatial (or spatially
variant, as the multi-level party literature shows), but parties have a geographical
presence. We need to be able to conceive of them in that light. Yet “party” as a concept
is not readily observable. The most standard definitions in Downsian political science
read something like “a team of ambitious office seekers.” That narrow conception
disregards several of the important functions that parties perform (see below) but also
renders the party into nothing more than a conglomeration of candidates, which is tough
to place on a map. Instead, it is more fruitful to rely on alternative (but equally well
known) conceptions of party as we disaggregate party into more clearly observable units,
for example: the party central office, the party in the electorate, and the party in
government (Key 1964); or, office-seekers, office-holders, and those with organizational
resources (Aldrich 1995, 20). Doing so yields different “ways” of being a party. Those
conceptual subunits hold greater intuitive observable qualities. We can identify party
sympathizers in the electorate, we can see members of parliamentary fractions on the
television, we can count the number of MPs of state legislatures by party, and we can
read in the newspaper about the actions of party leaders. That said, each of Key’s three
subunits could be conceptualized in multiple ways. For example, the party in the
electorate could refer to the number of party sympathizers, as I suggest above, but it
might relate to vote shares (though, importantly, vote shares by party change across types
of elections), or it might refer to the number of members of a party. The table below
offers a broader array of observable dimensions of party life.
11 Concept
Party in the electorate
Party central office
Party in government
Subconcept
Party identifiers; party voters; party
members (total number, subgroups [e.g.,
young, senior, female, etc.] if applicable)
Presence of party bureaucracy; character of
party linkages;
Size and power of legislative delegation
Discussions of these concepts and subconcepts that exist in the literature are generally not
geographical with the exception of election outcomes where (depending on one’s
country) television viewers are accustomed to seeing maps of red states and blue states
(in the US), black, red, yellow, and green states (Germany), or yellow, blue, and tricolor
states (Mexico), for example. However, the others can also be considered and
represented in geographical terms. This is most helpful following a recognition that the
concept exists not only in the realm of national level politics, but also at state and local
levels – i.e., after a shift in scale. For example, we might conceive of the central party
office as the national bureaucratic organization of a political party, with a resource base, a
staff, a headquarters, and the like. But we might also conceive of the party central office
as that national party headquarters, its state-level counterparts, its county organizations,
and perhaps even city-level offices. Conceptually speaking, all are parts of the central
party office (defined, as it is, as distinct conceptually from the party in the electorate and
in the legislature).
Operationalization of parties in place. A spatial theory of party organization requires
that parties be observable in space and place – so that we understand “how and why party
activities and support are dispersed or concentrated at the regional or national level”
(Shin 2001, 335). The task is, then, to take an expansive conception of party and
determine its observability in geographic spaces. The table below specifies some
potential measures for the subconcepts identified earlier.
12 Subconcept
Party identifiers
Party voters
Party members
Presence of party bureaucracy7
Character of party linkage8
Size of party legislative delegation
Power of party legislative delegation
Operationalization
Proportion of voters in district who support
party-candidates in elections or the party
itself (in the abstract)
Number of local voters for party candidates
in local, regional, national, and
supranational elections for legislative and
executive offices
Number of district level members; number
of members of affiliated organizations
Size of district office budget, staff,
headquarters; frequency and size of
outreach activities of local office; use of
external consultants; professionalization of
staffing and administration
Presence of organizational ties between
party and local civic associations/milieu
structures; targeted outreach efforts by
party at local level; recruitment of
civic/associational leaders as party
candidates
Number of members of party delegation
from district in local, regional, and national
offices
Majority/minority status of party in local
government; occupation of leadership
positions in legislative branch
Bringing spatial parties into causal frameworks. A spatial theory of party organization
improves our observations and their validity by situating parties in localities where
citizens actually experience them, and by disaggregating brute concepts into
geographically observable ones (e.g., taking a concept like party  party central office
 party county office  number of employees in the county office). It should also
improve our explanations of party organization, party systems, and ultimately,
democracy, in two dimensions.
7
8
These indicators are drawn from Cotter, et al. (1984) and Wuhs (2008, chapter 5)
These indicators are drawn from Wuhs (2008, chapter 6).
13 Statics. Parties exist in space (bounded spaces) as functions of other factors that
are also spatial. Kopstein and Reilly (2005, 129) refer to spatial “stocks” in their analysis
of economic reform and democratic development in Eastern Europe. Stocks “represent
the assets, liabilities, or general qualities of a given unit…. These qualities may be
physical, political, economic, or cultural and may either be helpful or harmful…. [They]
shape the alternatives available to decision makers.” These stocks, then, represent spatial
clusters of independent variables that exert influence on a dependent variable within a
given spatial context, including sectoral foundations of local economies, patterns of
employment, religious activity, educational levels, municipal development indices, and
civic engagement patterns.9 This static approach is quite similar to the cross-sectional
approach typically used, though it deliberately begins this analysis with the recognition of
place, where spatial dynamics can unfold when dynamic patterns are considered.
Dynamics. Parties do not only exist in one place at one moment, but demonstrate
relationships across time and space. One important component of this understanding of
party organization is allowing for the past to influence the present – both partisan
developments of the recent past and historical legacies that wield influence over the
present. In addition to developing over time, though, parties move across space, through
either a passive diffusion or spillover effect or a deliberate penetration of the national
territory (Panebianco 1988; Eliassen and Svaasand 1975). That is, parties flow. Flows
“represent the movement of information and resources between countries. Even if a
country has a certain spatial stock, it may be more or less open to flows of goods and
information from the outside world, whether by choice or by circumstance” (Kopstein
and Reilly 2005, 129). This statement operates at a national-level of analysis, where
flows occur between countries, and the extent of diffusion (or penetration, though it is not
considered by those authors) is “in large part a function of how open and interactive
states are.” Flow is probably facilitated at lower scales, since subnational borders present
fewer barriers to it than do national ones. Importantly, flow is neither unidirectional nor
permanent, whether in the case of party employees relocating from one state to the next,
foreign aid disbursements arriving from overseas, or succumbing to a democratic wave or
9
Add citation information here.
14 zeitgeist. Rather, it is “an ongoing give-and-take that varies over time and across space,
for example, when a party is reformed or replaced, or when places undergo economic
restructuring” (Shin 2001, 335). The figure below is a summary of this basic approach
For a party to flow across space (whether diffusion or penetration) requires attention to
two operational elements. The first is what constitutes an observable party flow, over
time. Incorporating time is of course essential since flow suggests that a stock in PlaceA
shifted to PlaceB between Time1 and Time2. For example, local party offices may receive
budget subsidies from other party offices, or staff members could move in order to help
build the party, but there is a temporal dimension to each of those transfers. The second
is what might drive party flow across space. Two potential clusters of spatialized
independent variables come to mind. Discussions of diffusion suggest that generalized
openness and interaction may lead to the spread of economic development and
democracy (Kopstein and Reilly; also that media piece). In that sense, socially
significant and measurable flows between PlaceA and PlaceB (like immigration,
investment, trade, and the like) may “carry” a party, passively. Alternatively, a party
might move across space (from PlaceA to PlaceB, but in this case, closer to penetration,
following some decision-making by party leaders) after identifying a potential new niche
15 for the party or an electoral opportunity. In the latter case, the flow is active, based on
the attributes of a given place and what it offers the party.
Bringing statics and dynamics together.10 Conceptualizing the spatial character
of party organizations requires bringing together these static and dynamic attributes.
Parties are not constant; they are also not either fully present or fully absent. Rather, as
Shin (2001) suggests, they continually re-constitute themselves. As observers we may
note that parties have bastions of support in some areas and not in others, but in both
kinds of places and in the intermediate cases, parties must work to manage their territorial
presence.
Demonstrating the utility of spatial theory
The remainder of this paper demonstrates the value-added of a spatial approach to party
poltics, one that 1) uses a spatially-observable conception of party, 2) adopts a local scale
to study party organization, 3) accounts for the complexity of local stocks, and 4) allows
for adjacency effects and flows. I accomplish this by comparing conventional (and good)
explanations of party organization with explanations that are more sensitive to place and
space, focusing on the experience of two parties, German’s Christlich Demokratische
Union (CDU) and Mexico’s Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). Both parties are incumbent
at the national level, and among the strongest parties in Eastern Germany (the post-GDR
Länder) and the Bajío region, where my comparison will be based. I focus locally on the
experiences of the CDU and PAN in two states within those regions where these parties
are often considered “hegemonic”: Sachsen and Querétaro. The narratives of party
formation I advance and the data I present in cartographic and tabular form confirm the
very localized experiences of these two organizations. After considering the organization
of both parties I assess what the approach adds to how we understand parties.
Conventional Explanations. Politics in contemporary Mexico and Germany are marked
by regional distinctions, as the maps below with the most recent federal election results
demonstrate. The relationship between geography and election outcomes is such that
10
While I cannot at this stage test these propositions, I thought it was important to establish them in the
context of this paper.
16 even among scholars with national-scale leanings, regional dynamics have become
increasingly central to their explanations.11
Mexico. Contextual effects are reliable predictors of voting behavior in Mexico at
the state and the district levels (Klesner 1987; Klesner 1994/5; Hiskey and Bowler 2005).
Higher local measures of urbanization, industrialization, and level of education, for
example, increased the likelihood of a district supporting one of the pro-democratic
opposition parties (the conservative PAN and the leftist PRD) in the 1990s. Taken
together, they suggested that support for the authoritarian incumbent at the time (the PRI)
reflected an urban-rural cleavage (more reliably for the PAN than the PRD). However,
during the transition years of the 1990s and through 2000, regional effects (measured as
dummy variables for the region where a state lies) were also key explanatory variables.
As Klesner (2005, 115) notes: “Looking at the four elections [of the 1990s and the 2000
contest] together, we can say that, controlling for other factors, the PAN regularly
overperformed in the center-west [the Bajío] and underperformed in Mexico City.
11
I clearly don’t attempt here to be comprehensive in my review of the literature. The authors I draw from
here are among those who are most sensitive to spatial dynamics in German and Mexican politics.
17 Except in the election of 2000, it also overperfomed in the north.” Regional effects were
also evident in the PRD’s performance during the same period, leading to the conclusion
that Mexico’s three-party system at the national level in act reflects two-party
competition between the PAN and PRI in Mexico’s northern extent and between the PRD
and PRI in Mexico City and the south.
That basic geography held through the 2006 federal elections, though the weak
performance of the PRI in the presidential contest left a much starker-looking north/PAN
vs. south/PRD divide map behind. However, the legislative elections that year were more
telling about the distribution of partisan support across Mexico’s states, revealing three
subnational two-party systems (PAN-PRD; PAN-PRI; and PRD-PRI), some states with
three-party systems, and states that appear to be under the hegemony of a single party
(the Bajío states under the PAN and Mexico City and Michoacán under the PRD).12
12
Harbers 2010 offers a compelling explanation of decentralization’s contribution to this complexity as
well as its implications for democratic governance.
18 Contextual effects and demographic differences were also quite powerful in explaining
individual voting behavior that year, with PAN voters significantly wealthier, urban,
church-going, and education than supporters of the PRD candidate (Klesner 2007, 3).
Regional divisions continued to be quite evident in executive and legislative outcomes
that year, with the PAN encountering more popular support in the north and the Bajío.13
Germany. German reunification in 1990 triggered a wave of scholarship about
the legacies of totalitarian rule and a socialist economy for a unified German politics, as
well as several studies about the transformation of the SED into a competitive political
party (first the PDS, now named Die Linke; Hough 2002). The overwhelming concern in
the literature has been the likelihood of successful reintegration of the five eastern Länder
and Berlin into the Federal Republic of Germany, given those legacies (e.g., recently,
Dalton 2011; Dalton and Jou 2010). For example, what are the implications of elite and
mass attitudinal differences about trust in parties and party discipline (the east scores
lower), support for the direct democracy and state intervention in the economy (the east
scores higher), and political intolerance (easterners are less tolerant) (Davidson-Schmich
2006, 4)? Levels of satisfaction with democracy are also lower in the east than the west,
and voters are more likely to be short-term in their orientation and relatively weakly
politically aligned. East-west distinctions are also visible in the most recent federal
election results, evident below.
13
Figure from Klesner (2007). Klesner to his credit is quite careful about avoiding the ecological inference
problem in his analysis. These individual-level attributes are very similar, though, to the district-level
attributes that Hiskey and Bowler (2005) found with regard to district-level voting returns.
19 Those attitudes also permeate the organizational lives of parties and affect party
competition in the east. As in many post-socialist contexts, eastern German parties
exhibit volatile support from one election to the next, have relatively weak membership
structures, weak ties to interest groups, and show lower levels of ideological cohesion
(Mair 1996; Rueschemeyer 1998; Segert 1995; Cusack 1996), perhaps reflecting
underlying differences in civic engagement and associational life (Davidson-Schmich
2004, 108-109).
While the predominant concern in the literature is about east-west differences in
Germany, these differences are also apparent in the performance of parties across the
eastern Länder. As the table below demonstrates, the CDU benefited from relatively
strong support in the founding democratic elections of 1990 (winning a plurality
everywhere but Brandenburg), likely tied to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s (CDU)
strong support for reunification and the promise of moving on to the Deutschmark. Yet
its seat share has dropped substantially in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
as well as in Sachsen (though it remains the plurality party there), the SPD has seen
20 declines throughout the region, and Die Linke has experienced a secular increase
(plurality parties in bold-face).
Table 2. Vote Shares in the Eastern Länder (three main parties)
Brandenburg
10/14/90
9/11/94
9/5/99
9/19/04
CDU seat share
30.68%
20.45%
28.09%
22.73%
SPD seat share
40.91%
59.09%
41.57%
37.50%
Die Linke seat share
14.77%
20.45%
24.72%
32.95%
MecklenburgVorpommern
10/14/90
10/16/94
9/27/98
9/22/02
9/17/06
CDU seat share
SPD seat share
Die Linke seat share
43.94%
42.25%
33.80%
35.21%
30.99%
31.82%
32.39%
38.03%
46.48%
32.39%
18.18%
25.35%
28.17%
18.31%
18.31%
Sachsen
10/14/90
9/11/94
9/19/99
9/19/04
CDU seat share
57.50%
64.17%
63.33%
44.35%
SPD seat share
20.00%
18.33%
11.67%
10.48%
Die Linke seat share
10.63%
17.50%
25.00%
25.00%
Sachsen-Anhalt
10/14/90
6/26/94
4/26/98
4/21/02
3/26/06
CDU seat share
45.28%
37.37%
24.14%
41.74%
41.24%
SPD seat share
25.47%
36.36%
40.52%
21.74%
24.74%
Die Linke seat share
11.32%
21.21%
21.55%
21.74%
26.80%
Thüringen
CDU seat share
49.44%
47.73%
55.68%
51.14%
SPD seat share
23.60%
32.95%
20.45%
17.05%
Die Linke seat share
10.11%
19.32%
23.86%
31.82%
10/14/90
10/16/94
9/12/99
6/13/04
Spatial Approach. The place-based theory of party organization differs in several ways
from these more conventional approaches, which offer important descriptions of
subnational party politics but suffer from two key limitations. First, they are relatively
fixed on high-resolution distinctions – east v. west in the Germany case, and the Bajío,
the north, the south (etc.) in the Mexican case. Local patterns of politics are emphasized
21 in order to reify those regional distinctions. Second, in some cases the regional
distinctions are not adequately considered. We should ask, for example, why the Bajío
effect is as consistent as it is. We know little of the underlying regional commonality that
drives the effect that Klesner identifies. At least in the case of eastern Germany there is a
socialist legacy to point to, though socialism was far from uniform across the GDR.
As a reminder, the spatial approach used here first adopts a multidimensional perspective
on party organization – moving beyond election returns and seat shares to a more
complex conceptualization of what parties’ territorial presence might be. Second, it shifts
scale downward, away from the federation and even below the regional level to examine
intra-regional party organization. While there are clear and present consequences for
regional and national politics that need to be considered, this approach is bottom-up in its
basic orientation. Third, this dynamic approach to the study of those local parties
incorporates interactions between flows (both those from outside the and intra-regional
ones) and stocks, or reservoirs of attributes within a territory. Here I present short
narrative histories of the PAN’s and CDU’s respective experiences in Querétaro and
Sachsen, complemented with geographical and tabular data to introduce the spatial
perspective. After reviewing both parties, I assess the value-added of this approach.
The PAN in Querétaro.14 The PAN’s national organization was founded in 1939
after several anticlerical and leftist reforms by President Lázaro Cárdenas triggered
mobilization by civic leaders, religious associations, and entrepreneurs on the political
right. The PAN remained a marginal niche party for at least three decades at the national
and the local level. While it was founded in Mexico City, from the beginning the PAN
maintained a territorial presence in several regions of Mexico; a notable one was in the
Bajío region of central-western Mexico (where Querétaro lies), which had been the seat
of Mexico’s independence war of the early 19th century and was home to the Cristero
rebellion of the 1920s. Still, even four decades after the party’s national foundation,
there were municipal party committees in only four of Querétaro’s 18 municipios
(Huimilpan, Pedro Escobedo, Tolimán, and El Marqués), all of which had been the home
14
This short discussion is composed from several interviews with PAN leaders and members conducted in
2008 in Querétaro.
22 regions of early PAN leaders tied to religious associations. Even the capital city,
Santiago de Querétaro, was controlled by the state party committee (Comité Directivo
Estatal) rather than its own party office.
The party experienced a particularly dark time in the 1960s, when the Querétaro state
government (under the firm control of the authoritarian PRI) changed the electoral laws
such that parties were required to have municipal committees with a too-high-for-thePAN membership threshold in order to nominate candidates for public office. The result
was the effective electoral and organizational disappearance of the PAN. The PAN could
not fill its state-level leadership positions and had very few of its own resources apart
from its treasured ideals – members recall, for example, providing campaigners with cars,
drivers, and even tortas. Ideologues in the PAN remained devout even during this period,
which mirrored a time at the national level often referred to as the PAN’s “crossing of the
desert.”
It wasn’t until after Mexico’s fraud-laden presidential election of 1988 (in which the
PAN had a quite successful candidate of its own, Manuel J. Clouthier) that the PAN
23 established a more defined presence in the state. Interviews with party leaders highlight
the key contribution of the mid 1980s introduction of proportional-representation
elections for local government, which created the opportunity for representation in local
government, along with the Clouthier campaign, for the party’s growth in this period.
Party Central Office. In 1988, a new municipal party committee (CDM) formed
in the urban municipality of San Juan del Río (the area of the state closest to Mexico
City), constituted almost entirely by people who were new to the party and hailed from
academia and small business, were local landowners, or were recent transplants from
Mexico City (Morales Garza 1998).15 The PAN’s base there thus differed substantially
from the PAN’s religious social base in the four municipios where it had deeper roots
(which also found renewed life after 1988). The municipios of the Sierra region (Arroyo
Seco, Landa de Matamoros, Jalpán de Serra, and Pinal de Amoles) were governed by a
regional committee of the party until the 1990s, unable to muster a significant enough
membership to form a committee under the party’s statutes.16 As late as 2008, party
leaders regarded the local party organization as too weak to manage its own affairs in six
of the 18 municipios, leading to the imposition of state-level delegates as the local party
leaders: Amealco de Bonfil, Cadereyta, Landa de Matamoros, Peñamiller, Pinal de
Amoles, and Tequisquiapan. The figure below (left side) shows the spatial distribution of
those committees and delegations.
15
Interestingly, the PAN’s early organizational development and electoral achievements in San Juan del
Río (also the second city of the state) are regarded as independent of the PAN’s performance in Querétaro
city – the former is the “little brother” of the state capital, and unlikely to influence it, according to PAN
members.
16
PAN leaders are quick to note that the absence of a formal party structure does not mean that panismo
itself was absent. Rather, they understand the formalization of party bureaucracy in the 1980s as a function
of the increasing electoralism of the national party organization, on one hand, and the consolidation of
personal leaderships at the local level, on the other.
24 Party in the Electorate. The party’s membership in Querétaro developed
somewhat independently of its organizational presence. In the 1950s and 1960s the
party’s presence in the state electorate amounted to 30 or so people working in the capital
city, with just a handful in the regional strongholds mentioned above. These activists
were doing the “prosthelytizing work” of the party in urban San Juan del Río, among the
ranchers of Huimilpan, and in Toliman, Cadereyta, and Tequisquiapan (in the latter case,
where it never really encountered much success). From 2003 through the 2009 elections,
the PAN experienced a tremendous explosion in local membership, but principally at the
“adherent” tier of membership that requires no membership fee but still entitled those
members to participate in some local candidate selection processes. As the figure above
(right side) demonstrates, there are very evident rural-urban differences in the party
membership, even controlling for population
25 Party in Government. The party’s historical presence in government was neglible
– indeed, it was among the geographic strongholds of the PRI through the 1980s. Its first
federal deputy from Querétaro, Francisco Ugalde Alvarez, was elected in 1979, and in
1982 the party won its first three seats in the state legislature. Its first two municipal
administrations came from contracesiones (post-electoral bargains with the PRI) in San
Juan del Río in 1991 and 1994. However, it spread over the state during the 1990s and
since 2000 – winning votes and municipal presidencies well into the northern Sierra
region. But while the party was able to penetrate/the party diffused over much of the
state, there seemed to be boundaries around some municipios that prevented the PAN’s
entrance, like Pinal de Amoles.17
17
Some of these barriers resemble those found by O’Loughlin et al. (1994) in their analysis of the
geographical support bases of the NSDAP in pre-World War II Germany.
26 From the 1990s onward, the party-in-local government spread to Amealco de Bonfil,
Ezekiel Montes, and Querétaro (1997, when it also won the governorship), to Cadereyta
de Montes, Corregidora, and Pedro Escobedo (2000, with the PAN-led national
democratic transition), and El Marqués, Huimilpan, Jalpan de Serra, Landa de
Matamoros, and Pinal de Amoles (2003 and 2006). In 2009, the PAN also won its first
ayuntamientos (local governments) in Arroyo Seco, Colón, and Tequisquiapan. To date,
then, it has not occupied city hall in only Peñamiller, San Joaquín, and Tolimán. And
while the party has expanded across much of the state, the 2009 contest revealed that the
PAN’s bastions were perhaps not as secure as the party had hoped: it lost legislative seats
from the capital city’s districts, lost control of Corregidora, El Marqués, Huimilplan, and
San Juan del Río. Most crucially, the PRI managed to retake the governorship from the
PAN.18
Discussion of the PAN in Querétaro. The PAN has historically done poorly in
Querétaro’s rural areas despite its relatively long history in the state. Party leaders
attribute the urban bias of party support to the challenges of identifying candidates in
rural communities to run under the party banner because of the historically powerful rural
presence of the PAN’s main competitor in the state, the PRI. The PAN also suffers in
those areas from a widespread perception of the party as simply a pavement party. In
addition to the party label and candidate quality, leaders point to success in government
as a stock upon which the party draws at election time – for example, through the
regionally-administered Programas de acción comunitaria, social development works
projects that are often citizens’ initial introductions to PAN government. Of course,
government performance cuts both ways: where the PAN has lost municipal governments
(as in its historic base San Juan del Río), leaders attribute the outcome to failures in local
government. Party leaders also point to recruitment of candidates with local followings
and infrastructure (highway routes, specifically) as determinants stock- and flow-based
18
I might also examine shares of state legislature seats and federal deputy seats. The party’s performance
in 2009 is likely the function of a combination of factors – local factors like candidate quality and
frustration with the PAN as the new hegemonic party of Querétaro, but also the negative effects of
President Calderón’s drug offensive, which has cost his party (the PAN) support across the country.
27 mechanisms for PAN growth in the region. Nacho Rubio, a member of the Chamber of
Deputies from 2006-2009 from the Sierra region was the leader of an annual Catholic
pilgrimage recruited to run for the PAN – and he is credited with bringing the PAN into
rural Querétaro. One PAN member suggested that the PAN’s expansion into the Sierra
was a result of highway roadsigns trumpeting the PAN’s accomplishments in local
government. To get to the Sierra, one had to pass these signs, and perhaps some voters
came to consider the PAN a viable alternative as a result.
The CDU in Sachsen.19 While many studies of post-socialist eastern Germany
depart from the era of the German Democratic Republic (1949-1989), it is important to
recognize that unified Germany had an important, national Christian party, Zentrum,
during the interwar period that in the postwar period (even in the Soviet-occupied zones)
developed into the Christian-Democratic Union, a national party organization.20 That is,
there was some history of CDU organization in eastern Germany prior to the division of
East and West. However, as repression by the Soviets increased during the late 1940s
and after the establishment of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, the CDU moved
from a religious and bourgeois party to a “blocpartei,” one of a handful of officially
sanctioned opposition parties that served as the loyal opposition to the Socialist Unity
Party, or SED (Saalfeld 2010). While members were allowed to assemble, the party’s
actions and achievements were carefully managed, its leaders were regularly observed by
the state security agency, and no contact was permitted between local CDU offices.
While the CDU had more than 200,000 members in eastern Germany prior to partition,
by the time the Berlin Wall was built it had dropped to just 70,000 (Segert 1995), with
many remaining in the party mostly because of family and confessional traditions. While
the party did seek to articulate an ideological program distinct from the SED (as in the
1952 Meissen Theses), it had a meager political and social presence, and instead became
a safe haven for religious East Germans for most of the GDR period.
19
This discussion is also the product of several interviews conducted in summer 2011 in Sachsen with
CDU leaders and members.
20
The Deutsche Demokratische Partei also contributed to the CDU’s formation.
28 Pressure to liberalize the SED’s totalitarian rule mounted in the 1980s, especially
following Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of perestroika and glasnost, but General
Secretary Erich Honecker resisted them. The CDU also remained loyal to the GDR
model through the 1980s, until in September 1989 four authors wrote the “Letter from
Weimar” which advocated political liberalization, travel rights, environmentalism, and
media freedom. The following two months saw increasingly open criticism of the GDR,
rising dissatisfaction with the blocpartei CDU’s SED-tolerant leadership, and a greater
call for the party to “relieve the church and other such organizations of their role as
substitutes for the parties, a role for which they lacked strength and competence”
(Roberts 1997, 67). Almost as the Berlin Wall was falling, the east-CDU named a new
leader, adopted new and pro-democratic party institutions, and expressed support for
reunification and Germany’s social market economy (Lapp 1990, 65; Roberts 1997, 689).
After November and December of 1989, the east-CDU began two interrelated types of
negotiations and discussions. First, it reached out to other opposition forces (importantly,
Democratic Awakening) about forming coalitions in advance of the Volkskammer
elections scheduled for March 1990 (the only democratic elections that occurred in the
GDR). Second, the east-CDU welcomed visitors from the western CDU as well as
western political functionaries who advised on party organization, campaign technique,
and public administration. Many of those western imports stayed after reunification,
assuming key posts in state government. For example, Sachsen’s first two ministerpresidents, Kurt Biedenkopf and Georg Milbradt, hailed from the west; Sachsen did not
elect a native to the post until 2009. The early 1990s thus witnessed a complicated party
formation dynamic in which: local blocpartei CDU organizations provided temporary
leadership, some members, and “the hardware – staff, typewriters, and offices,”21
Democratic Awakening and other protest organizations provided moral leadership and
legitimacy, and westerners provided political leadership and electoral expertise. This was
not a uniform process, however. Five new Länder (states) were reconstituted from the
GDR territory, each composed of many Kreise, or counties. Because inter-regional
21
Interview with blocpartei-CDU and CDU member, June 2011.
29 coordination had not been permitted within the blocpartei-CDU and because the Länder
are marked by significant internal differences growing from religious, class, and other
cleavages, party development has been very heterogeneous despite conceptually common
“inputs.”
Sachsen is one of the strongest CDU states in the former GDR. The party won 92 of 160
seats in the founding democratic elections of October 1990, and continued to win outright
majorities in the subsequent two cycles. While its performance was somewhat weaker in
2004 and 2009, its ability to appoint the minister-president and enter government was
never in question. Sachsen is also eastern Germany’s most populous state, with three
large cities (the capital Dresden, with a high-tech and tourist economic base, and two
industrial and trading centers in Chemnitz and Leipzig). Much of the area outside those
cities is fairly rural in character.
30 Party in Government. The party in state government is thus quite strong.
Descending to the local level (gemeinde), it is clear that the party’s dominance is fairly
thorough, though not universal.
Table 2. Results for Local Council Elections in Sachsen, 2009
Kreise
BAUTZEN
CHEMNITZ STADT
DRESDEN STADT
ERZGEBIRGKREIS
GOERLITZ
LEIPZIG
LEIPZIG STADT
MEISSEN
MITTELSACHSEN
NORDSACHSEN
SAECHSISCHE
SCHWEIZOSTERZGEBIRGE
VOGTLANDKREIS
ZWICKAU
CDU
34.30
21.80
31.00
40.90
31.00
30.60
23.70
35.20
36.60
34.40
Indep
35.10
14.5
8
31.80
41.80
27.60
2.9
30.80
32.80
26.80
Die Linke
12.20
22.2
16.2
12.20
12.80
16.20
23.2
13.20
13.40
13.40
SPD
6.90
19.80
12.30
6.60
5.10
14.50
20.40
8.10
7.90
12.60
37.40
32.20
35.20
32.60
28.60
24.50
12.50
14.60
16.60
5.00
10.20
10.70
Local election results from the mid 1990s also reveal relatively stronger support for the
party in rural areas of the state, and a blind spot for the party in Leipzig and the
surrounding area. By the 2004 local elections, the party’s support had dispersed through
the state, continued to demonstrate a rural bias, and had become quite dense in two rural
Kreise, Erzebirgkreis and Mittelsachsen, both evident in the figure below.
31 Party Central Office. The party bureaucratic apparatus is uniform across Sachsen
– each Kreise has a party office, though they are administratively quite weak. Each has
only one full time employee, the Kreisgeschäftsführer, an administrative position, and
some secretarial assistance. All other local party work is done by volunteers – meaning
that efforts like membership drives, candidate recruitment and local campaign work are
performed by non-professionals with other obligations. In two Kreise (Nordsachsen and
Mittelsachsen) the local party organization owns its headquarters (something Cotter, et al.
1984 regard as a significant indicator of organizational strength), though party
bureaucrats do not interpret ownership as an indicator of local organizational strength.22
Indeed, the party’s bureaucratic presence in Sachsen may well be a legacy of the
subsidies that the blocpartei-CDU received from the SED regime; there was a party
headquarters in existence prior to reunification in many of these cases.23
22
23
Interview with CDU bureaucrat, June 2011.
I am awaiting data to confirm or disconfirm this hypothesis.
32 Party in the Electorate. Membership in parties is declining across Germany, and
eastern Germans are especially reticent to join and trust political parties – much like their
Mexican counterparts. That is another good reason to take party membership as only one
indicator of party presence. That said, where members are relatively concentrated (even
at lower overall levels of concentration), it seems likely that it is a significant indicator of
local party presence. Membership figures from 1995 and 2006 confirm the CDU’s
uneven presence across Sachsen. There is a deep well of support for the CDU in
Erzgebirg, among the densest concentrations of CDU members in the state. Likewise,
Leipzig and its surroundings show a weaker presence for the party in the electorate. The
party’s 2006 membership shows an interesting north-south dynamic as well – patterns
that are also evident in the membership of the Junge Union, the party’s youth
organization, in 2001 and 2006. Youth membership in the party is one of the few
dimensions where the party demonstrates an urban bias – on this measure of party
presence, the CDU-Sachsen looks like a pavement party, not a rural one.
33 Membership in the party’s youth organization, Junge Union, also suggests some
geographic effects – a belt across Sachsen in the earlier period and a strong north-south
dimension later on. Interesting, prior to the GDR period, Sachsen was a “red state”
dominated politically by the CDU’s main rival, the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
During that time, politicians spoke of a red belt that crossed the center of Sachsen. The
youth organization of the CDU has seemingly formed a black belt across the same space.
Discussion of the CDU in Sachsen. What explains the different levels of support
the CDU finds across Sachsen? On one level, the party has overall lower levels of nonvoting support in a manner that is quite consistent with other post-socialist cases, where
34 citizens may vote for parties but are reticent to join as militants. A certain disconnect
between the presence of a party in government and its presence in the electorate should
perhaps be expected. Party leaders and bureaucrats offer some additional hypotheses to
account for the party’s spatially variable performance. Concentrations in southern
Sachsen (especially around Erzgebirg) could result from its location in the Saxon Ore
Mountains – “there are only villages, no big towns, and the people have needed to depend
on each other. They must work together.”24 That is, higher levels of party organization
in this case may result from stocks of civic culture akin to what Putnam witnessed in
northern Italy during the dark ages.
The same region has a concentration of practicing Christians, among the CDU’s natural
constituencies in the German context – a rival explanation, perhaps, but also quite
intertwined with the topography of the land (i.e., would confessionalism have continued
were the topography different?). One of the state’s CDU leaders also comes from
Erzgebirg, which may seem inconsequential but for the fact that this Kreise and another,
Bautzen (from which Minister-President Stanislaw Tillich comes) are the only two
localities in Sachsen where membership in the CDU is actually increasing. In the latter
case, it may also be that in Bautzen, home of a concentration of ethnic Sorbs (Tillich is
also Sorbian), the party has developed an ethnic character.
Assessing the place-based approach. The value of a place-based approach must
go beyond a richer description of what happens locally. Early I suggested that the highresolution, regional approach of the subnational party systems scholars obscured local
dimensions of party organization and failed to account for the particularities of regions
(operationalized as dummy variables). They, and even more nationally-oriented studies
of party organization and party systems, clearly tell us a lot about the operations of
representative democracy; for example, bastions and blind spots contribute to the
subnational party systems that multi-level party systems scholars examine, and hint at the
complexities and contradictions that interest representation may encounter across space.
24
Interview with CDU bureaucrat, June 2011.
35 The question is what we gain from a place-based perspective. The short discussions
presented here are not “tests” of a place-based theory of parties, but rather demonstrations
of the need for a spatial approach and hypotheses about how stocks and flows might
interact over time and space to shape the contours of party organization. They should be
taken as such – an anticipation of the analytic insights that execution of the approach will
offer.
The value added of multidimensionality and scale. Disaggregating parties into
observable units that operate in spatial terms yields new insights into their complexity.
While national electoral maps and conventional approaches suggest that the parties are
strong in these states and their respective regions, the conception of party (vote share)
and the scale combine to overrepresent the power that the PAN and CDU have. Indeed,
shifting toward a local scale and differentiating across spheres of party life (broadly
speaking, as party in government, party in the electorate, and the party central office)
reveal different stories. For example, the scalar shift alone (i.e., still looking at election
returns as a measure of the party in government) shows that the support for these parties
is far from homogenous in their strength across Sachsen and Querétaro. Both parties
have electoral blind spots where they have failed to establish traction with the electorate
despite more than a decade of holding the statehouse.
These are not important only because they demonstrate territorial differentiation
and unevenness of party presence. Taking party bureaucratic data, electoral data, and
membership data together gives a greater depth to discussions of party presence and
suggests important hypotheses for research. For example, in a context where the party
has little bureaucratic presence and few members, like the PAN in Querétaro’s Sierra, we
see evidence of a candidate-centered politics that might augur poorly (for the PAN and
the party system) in terms of electoral volatility. Likewise, where we see persistent
geographic disparities in party strength across arenas of party life (the north-south
division in Sachsen and the same Sierra-based split in Querétaro), we should be
concerned about a party’s systemness, and perhaps about its cohesion as a force in
government. The same questions about cohesion and systemness might be asked of a
party that in some areas is a confessional party (the CDU in Erzgebirg or the PAN in the
36 Sierra and Huimilpan, for example), in others an ethnic party (the CDU in Bautzen,
perhaps?), and in others a pro-business party (the CDU in Dresden, the PAN in San Juan
del Río and Querétaro). These divisions, especially in the context of weak party
identification typical in Germany and Mexico, may well complicate the work of state
legislatures, and given the likelihood of such patterns holding elsewhere, also have
national implications.
The value added of adjacency and flow. The CDU’s members throughout
Sachsen are locals, veterans of the blocpartei CDU or one of the social movements that
emerged in the late 1980s. Likewise, most panistas in Querétaro are local entrepreneurs,
ranchers, and religious conservatives. That said, we cannot explain the presence or
performance of the either party with any validity without incorporating spatial effects.
The proximate triggers to the revival of the politically dormant PAN and the
politicization of the blocpartei CDU came from outside Querétaro and Sachsen with
transformations to national-level politics, and in neither case did incumbent leaders of the
organizations have the skills to reposition their parties as viable electoral alternatives.
Experts with that professional expertise arrived the West, migrants from Mexico City
became the early base of the party, and even ideas about what sorts of change might be
possible in the non-democratic settings (the Letter from Weimar, for example) influenced
how local organizations formed – in all cases collaborating with “old” members of those
prior organizations in a spatially heterogeneous process.25
Those first flows were dramatic, but adjacency and spatial effects continued. The
maps presented earlier suggested (though I need to confirm with more data and a
statistical analysis) that the parties have, in fact, spread over Querétaro and Sachsen since
the early 1990s. Whether that spread reflects penetration or diffusion remains an open
question, one that I will be researching in the future, and some places (around Leipzig
and Pinal de Amoles) seem to resist those flows. Overall, though, it seems like adjacency
effects are also present and will continue to interact with local stocks.26
25
This process in fact resembles the dynamic of state formation explored in Boone 2005.
CDU’s early triumph in Sachsen may have offered it some momentum in subsequent state legislative
elections; the same may hold for the PAN’s early victory in San Juan del Río. But dynamics on the ground
26 The
37 Discussion. The PAN and the CDU are the regular victors in elections in
Querétaro and Sachsen, but these states are not “blue” and “black.” The party in
government, party in the electorate, and party central office all show very significant
geographic inconsistencies. There are clear areas of “negative” spatial homogeneity (like
Pinal de Amoles and Tequisquiapan, where the PAN cannot seem to get a foothold) and
“positive” spatial homogeneity – as in Erzgebirgkreis, where the CDU is quite strong for
relatively unclear reasons, and in the southern municipality of San Juan del Río (despite a
recent loss). The CDU also displays pretty consistently a north-south division in
Sachsen. We also see some preliminary evidence of party flow from the lowlands of
Querétaro northward into the Sierra region – evident both in electoral returns and in the
party’s bureaucratic presence.
The place-based approach, while local or bottom-up in its orientation, doesn’t just
introduce new information about local politics. It also adds new perspectives to the
concerns that party scholars address at the regional and national levels. By directing our
attention to the multidimensional character of party organizations, focusing on the local
level, and being attentive both to local stocks and inter-regional flows, we can do a better
job understanding the foundations of party institutionalization and party-system
institutionalization. The political consequences of the varied local topography of party
organization may be clearest at the local level, where party leaders in both countries have
expressed uncertainty about their parties’ futures because of their lack of societal roots.
But there are important concerns for national and regional party leaders as well, as local
electoral volatility and low party cohesion threaten to spill over.
in particular communities conditioned where the PAN and CDU developed bastions and blind spots.
Entrenched opposition in the form of the PRI and the SPD probably barred the parties’ entries to rural
Querétaro and the area around Leipzig despite diffusion across the two states. These and related factors
will be introduced at the next stage in this project.
38 Concluding Thoughts
Few question whether parties are essential to the deepening of democratic rule in Latin
America and other recently democratizing areas, and scholars are concerned about the
implications of party organizational changes in the advanced industrialized countries.
Party system institutionalization and party institutionalization are linchpins of
representative democracy. Territorial politics scholars have recently raised concerns
about the implications of subnational diversity in patterns of party competition for
interest representation, government formation, and the like – concerns that need to be
taken seriously.
What scholars have not yet done, as a matter of course, is ask questions about where the
work that parties do in representative democratic systems actually occurs. While our
measures in political science tend to operate at the national and regional levels, I suggest
here that much of the crucial work of parties is local work, and that as a result we need to
adopt an approach to the study of parties that is sensitive to place. I do not believe that
“all politics is local,” but party politics is more local than we typically admit. By failing
to conceptualize parties in a thorough-going way, by not considering variations in party
organization across scale, and by not allowing for effects of flow and adjacency, we
misunderstand how parties form, establish territorial presence, relate to social interests,
and do their electoral work.
With this paper I sought to introduce this perspective and show its value-added through a
close examination of two parties that are regarded as “hegemonic” in their locales of
Querétaro and Sachsen. They might be electorally hegemonic, but their organizations
suggest something very different – parties that exist above their societies but that are not
tethered to them adequately. In both places, party leaders have expressed concern about
this “state of the party” because of its implications for future elections. In political
science, we should be concerned about what it suggests about the likelihood of
territorially-based representation gaps in the future.
References:
Forthcoming. Apologies.
39 40