THE DIFFUSION OF PARTY ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURES FROM "OLD

EUROPE" TO "NEW": A HYPOTHESIS

NICHOLAS AYLOTT
Sdertrn University, Stockholm
(nicholas.aylott@sh.se)

Paper prepared for a panel on Conflict and Cohesion in North European Political Parties, in
the section on the Organization of Conflict Inside Political Parties, at the ECPR general
conference, Potsdam, September 10th-12th 2009.

This is very much work in progress. Comments and criticisms are exceedingly welcome, but
please do not quote without permission.

Abstract
This paper constitutes the first, conceptual step in a research project that aims to map
organisational patterns in the political parties of the Baltic states, which have at least in this
intra-party respect been neglected in the literature hitherto. For the purposes of evaluation,
two ideal-typical models of party organisation, the Nordic and the Central European, are
drawn up; both are informed by the perspective of intra-party delegation. Subsequent,
empirical work will thus seek to place the Baltic parties on a scale between these two models. A
discussion in the paper on the theory of policy diffusion leads to a working hypothesis.
Because of organisational "diffusion-by-emulation", it is suggested, Baltic parties will resemble
Nordic ones more than they do those elsewhere in ex-communist Europe.

final draft 2009-08-17

INTRODUCTION
This paper is inspired by two parallel research problems. The first concerns the contemporary
organisational challenges faced by political parties across the European continent. Parties
remain central to democracy, particularly in parliamentary systems. If party action is vital in
explaining all sorts of political phenomena, it is often necessary to look inside the party in
order to explain why a particular course of action was adopted. "In other words," writes Katz
(2002:88), "even in the cases in which the party can be regarded as an actor, it is important to
remember that each party is also an organization with its own internal life and politics."
The second research problem is the spatial and temporal nature of those challenges to party
organisation and parties' responses to them. Are the challenges similar in very different
political contexts? If they are similar, are parties' organisational responses also similar, or do
they differ according to the historical and institutional circumstances prevailing in a given
time and place? To what extent are parties' responses shaped by the responses of other parties
in other contexts?
The aim of the paper is to outline some ways in which these problems of party organisation
might be explored. It constitutes a first step in a broader project on party organisation in old
and new democracies.[1] The paper unfolds in the following way. First, I look at the literature
on party organisation in what has been called "old" and "new Europe", examining particularly
the differing contexts of party formation. Then I change tack and review some of the literature
on the diffusion of policies and organisational forms from some countries to others. Next, a
research design is outlined: indicators are proposed, cases for study suggested, and a
hypothesis formulated. Finally, I summarise and conclude.

PARTIES IN "OLD" AND "NEW EUROPE"

Literature on political parties in relatively young European democracies has proliferated in
recent years. Since Kopecky asked, almost a decade and a half ago, "what type of party is likely
to emerge?" (1995), a growing section has been interested in the organisation of parties.
Some of the most intriguing contributions have come from van Biezen (2000, 2003, 2005). She
starts with the observation (2003:6-7, 2005:149) that the models developed by students of West
European parties are essentially ones of change, from one ideal type to another: the mass-party
model illustrated the decline of the cadre party, the catch-all and electoral-professional party
illustrated the decline of the mass party, and so on. That, in turn, places a question mark
against the usefulness of such models in the analysis of parties that began their existences or,
in a few cases, resumed their existences after long interruptions during the era of communist
dictatorship in very different circumstances. The models can still be helpful, though, as
reference points for inquiries into how those different circumstances might shape different
patterns of party organisation. On that score, van Biezen reflects on three possible scenarios

(2005:149-54).
One is a "life-cycle scenario", in which parties in ex-communist countries undergo a sequential
development from one pattern to another in much the same way as their western counterparts
did, though not necessarily at the same pace. A second scenario purports a "generational
effect", in which those founding circumstances are so important that they shape a party's
organisational features thereafter, making it hard or impossible to change over time a sort of
strong version of Panebianco's (1988) emphasis on "genetic" origins.
A third scenario involves a "period effect", in which prevailing environmental factors at any
given moment are decisive for party organisation, so that similar contemporary environments
will induce similar-looking parties, irrespective of their origins or lives hitherto. Parties in
Central and Eastern Europe would thus resemble those in Western Europe rather closely.
Unencumbered by the historical baggage that most West European parties have, those in
ex-communist Europe may even have "leapfrogged" over them towards some model of
organisational development (Olson 1998:445; Perkins 1996:369).
In hypothesising about which scenario or (more likely) which combination of scenarios
obtains in any given cases, assessing the nature of the political environment during the 20
years of post-communist democracy obviously makes sense. Comparison with the
circumstances in which West European parties formed and developed is a natural start.
The different contexts of party formation
Perhaps the main difference concerns the relationship between party formation and
democratisation (van Biezen 2003:28-48, 157-9). In West European countries, most main
parties were "externally created" (Duverger 1954:xxx), in that they were formed by political
actors who were outside the organs of national power with the intention of forcing their
admission into those organs. In other words, they were set up before the advent of mass
democracy, while the electoral franchise was still very limited; indeed, extending the franchise
was one of their central objectives. Yet, at least for a period before democracy was achieved,
the pre-democratic regimes were unable or unwilling to suppress these new political forces.
What this meant, inte alia, was that a nascent party had both the licence and the incentive to
build up its organisation as its most potent political resource. The best way of doing that,
moreover, was through attracting lots of members, who supplied membership dues and their
labour for campaigning and agitating. And members, in turn, were attracted through their
being offered them influence in shaping the party's direction that is, through a bottom-up,
internally democratic organisational structure.
Most such externally created parties were founded on the premise that they primarily
represented a social class. They thus both reflected and embodied a particular cleavage within
society, reinforcing class identity and party identity. When enfranchisement came, it too was
largely class based, and often gradual, which further attached each new enfranchised group to

the party that represented it. So too did strong institutional relationships between parties and
other class-based organisations. Of course, this stylised summary of democratisation in
Western Europe (or perhaps, more accurately, North-West Europe) is based primarily on the
experience of the social democratic parties, which represented the interests of the working
class and which were associated, often intimately, with trade-union movements. But, in line
with Duverger's (1954) observed "contagion from the left", mass democracy compelled the
internally created, cadre-type parties to adopt many of the mass parties' electorally efficient
organisational structures.
Democratisation in ex-communist Europe created very different contexts for party formation.
Above all, democracy preceded party formation: the collapse of the communist power
monopoly happened quickly, and the elections that followed soon after left little time for the
parties that competed in them to build up much in the way of organisations, let alone
organisations with brands that could establish identification and loyalty on the part activists,
members or electors (Mair 1997:180). Once they had been elected on party labels, moreover,
the various party elites had to concentrate on resolving with each other questions of
institutional design and economic reform, rather than turning inwards to the task of building
up their respective party organisations. One of these institutional questions was often the
public subsidy of their own parties; and once that was achieved, the financial incentive to
attract party members became weaker still. Electors, meanwhile, had no incentive to mobilise
in pursuit of the clear, singular political objective of extending the franchise. As van Biezen
(2003:32) puts it, "while parties in the old democracies generally started out as organizations of
society demanding participation, parties in the new democracies are faced with the challenge
of enticing citizens who already have rights of participation to actually exercise those rights."
The sudden inclusion of most of the adult population in a genuinely democratic franchise also
undermined party institutionalisation in additional ways. Again in contrast to Western
Europe, the issues around which parties formed in post-communist Europe were usually not
group rights but rather issues, often institutional issues. This left little room for parties based
on self-conscious class identity in other words, cleavages (see also Geddes 1995:252-8; Mair
1997:181-4). Class politics was even less likely thanks to the specific legacy of communist rule.
Civil-society organisations like trade unions and farmers' associations or churches, which had
provided valuable support to the mass parties of Western Europe, had been suppressed by the
regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. If they revived after democratisation, they saw with
the odd exception little reason to associate themselves with a particular party. Indeed,
decades of rule by one monopolistic party had, in the eyes of many citizens, discredited the
whole idea of joining a party, even the very notion of party (Enyedi 2006:233).
Evidence from Central Europe
In light of all this, van Biezen (2003:38-49) expected to find a combination of her
generation-effect and period-effect scenarios. Put simply, parties in ex-communist countries
would reflect many of the same features that have increasingly characterised West European

parties, because they are subject to many of the same environmental conditions globalising
economies, growing supranational authority, modern communication technologies, and so on.
But because of the particular contexts of their formation, it was thought that the parties in
ex-communist countries would display these features in more developed form. More
specifically, parties would be dominated by their leaders, particularly those with positions in
national parliaments or governments in other words, the party in public office (Katz and
Mair 2002). As in essence internally created organisations (van Biezen 2005:165), parties
would to a large extent resemble the original cadre parties, as loose alliances of notables.
Crucially, the main thrust of their activity would be aimed at voters, not members. Indeed, the
membership organisation would be comparatively weak, especially at local level (the party on
the ground); membership levels in general would be low. Even at national level (the party in
central office), however, the party organisation would be in the shadow of its representatives in
public office. With their economic resources derived directly from the state, and without even
having gone through a period in which that had not been the case, parties in ex-communist
Europe would be even more like the semi-public institutions that their West European
equivalents had grown to resemble (van Biezen 2004).
In fact, when examining parties in two post-communist countries, the Czech Republic and
Hungary, van Biezen (2003:105-52, 2005:155-60) found her expectations only partly
confirmed.[2] Most parties were certainly much more voter- than member-orientated. Party
memberships were generally low, and most parties showed rather limited interest in attracting
more members. But there were exceptions. In particular, the Czech Communists, the
continuation of the main ruling party during the era of dictatorship, and the Hungarian
Socialists, which had experienced a cleaner break with the communist past, had higher
membership levels and generally gave those members a somewhat bigger role in the
management of the party. An exception to the expected pattern of weak institutional ties with
civil-society organisations was the Hungarian Christian Democrats' connections to Catholic
groups.[3] Candidate selection for national elections was usually steered by the party
leaderships, which often enjoyed veto rights. But even in an otherwise highly centralised party
like Hungary's Fidesz, candidate selection for sub-national elections was left pretty much to
local and regional branches.[4]
An overview of the balance of power within Czech and Hungarian parties (van Biezen
2003:161-76, 2005:166-8) indicates, quite strikingly, that the party in central office was more
powerful than expected. Party leadership was based there and was often highly personalised.
Party statutes often made its MPs' decision-making autonomy subject to explicit limits.
Publicly elected officials, like MPs, were given ex officio places on party organisation executive
organs; but representatives of the executive organs were often also similarly given places in
parliamentary groups' meetings. With exceptions, staff employed by the central office were
more numerous in each party than were staff employed by its parliamentary group.
One reason for the imbalance in staff allocation was that public subsidies which, as expected,
provided the lion's share of party finance, though not to a notably higher level than in many

West European parties went primarily to the central offices rather than to the parliamentary
groups. Indeed, several parties required their MPs to divert a portion of their salaries to the
party organisations (van Biezen 2003:177-201, 2005:161-4). It has, furthermore, been
suggested that holding government office is important from a financial perspective not only
because of direct state subsidies, but also because it offers a party a way to expand its illicit
funding as a return from companies that are favoured by public policy (van Biezen and
Kopecky 2003:120; Kopecky 2007).
Inferences and complications
The inferences drawn from these results suggest, as intimated above, that parties do not
experience some sort of pre-ordained life cycle in the structuring of their internal lives. Rather,
they respond to a mixture of environmental factors that obtain in their contemporary settings
and factors that obtained during their formation. Although there were differences between
Czech and Hungarian parties, and between individual parties in each country, they had
enough in common to suggest that while deep-seated historical differences may have
conditioned the ease of overall transition from communist rule (Kitschelt et al 1999), they
were not decisive at party level.
Van Biezen (2003:216-7, 2005:167-8) reasons that the main area in which her findings proved
unexpected can be explained by the peculiar challenges faced by the leaders of parties in new
democracies. With little in the way of class identity or even organisational continuity to
sustain party loyalties among members or voters or elected representatives (what van Biezen
calls "a sense of party"), the parties that initially formed after the fall of communism were very
prone to defections and splits.[5] When disagreements arose within parties over institutional
or policy issues, or even when personal ambitions clashed, protagonists frequently decided
that there was little to dissuade them from, in the terms of Hirschman's (1970) classic model,
using exit instead of loyalty or voice. Voters were sufficiently nonaligned, and sufficiently
easily reachable via modern media, to make defecting and starting a new party a relatively
attractive option to a political entrepreneur (Geddes 1995:250; Mair 1997:187-92; Pettai and
Kreuzer 1998:163). Centralised parties, with power firmly in the hands of the central office
and, in particular, the leader of the organisation, were a means of offsetting this lack of
identification and loyalty through strict formal control.[6]
This is an entirely plausible interpretation of fascinating data. But it raises two further
questions, linked to each other. One is empirical; the other concerns causality. First, do the
patterns identified in the Czech Republic and Hungary exist in other ex-communist countries?
Second, what exactly are the mechanisms that link, on one hand, the environmental
conditions that apply currently and that applied at the time of formation with, on the other
hand, the dependent phenomenon, party organisational patterns?
Van Biezen's "neo-institutionalist perspective, in which existing structures make a difference
for the choices that will be made [by political actors]" (2003:15, also 2005:153-4), arguably

implies that institutional incentives are so strong that party actors have only limited room for
manoeuvre; hence the limited variation between Czech and Hungarian party organisations.
The evidence also suggests that, even if the leapfrogging metaphor is surely too teleological,
they also appear to resemble parties in Western Europe to quite a high degree. For one thing,
the basic West European premise of a membership organisation based on territorial sub-units
has been replicated in Central and Eastern Europe (van Biezen 2005:155). Despite this formal
structure, the actual memberships of those membership organisations are generally low; but
this can increasingly also be said of most West European parties. Indeed, beyond formal
membership, the absence of strong party-identification and cleavage structures can hardly said
to be a specially ex-communist phenomenon (Lane and Ersson 1997).[7] Moreover, despite
their weakness on the ground, parties in the newer democracies have, in quite a short period,
secured a collective grip on political representation (at least at national level) that one Czech
observer calls "quite astonishing" (Kopecky 2003:142). Enyedi and Toka's (2007:122) verdict
on Hungary is a little more reserved; but it is in effect similar.
Perhaps this convergence between parties in older and newer democracies does indicate an
environmental period-effect. But could there be an alternative explanation? Could it be that,
rather than incentives created by prevailing institutional conditions, a big reason for the
patterns of party organisation that we observe is that the political entrepreneurs who
established parties in ex-communist countries consciously copied each other and what they
saw in older parties in other countries? If there is anything in such a suggestion, we may have a
case of Galton's problem.

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CASES

Galton's problem is about the potential for cases to influence each other (Jahn 2006:409-10).
This can potentially invalidate claims about causal variables. For example, a
most-different-systems research design, in which cases with as little as possible in common are
chosen, has often been suggested as a good way of identifying a causal relationship. If such
diverse cases nevertheless share some feature, usually a value on an outcome variable, then any
independent variable on which they also share a value is likely to have influenced the outcome
in all cases. But if there was direct influence between cases, that causal assertion is undermined.
Put simply, one case may have been copied by the others. The other classic small-N research
design, most similar systems, is probably equally vulnerable to Galton's problem. Different
outcomes in cases that otherwise resemble each other could have been induced by one or more
cases consciously not copying others.
One way to tackle Galton's problem is to bring it into the centre of research design in other
words, to study "diffusion" of the dependent phenomenon. This is no easy task. Yet diffusion
studies, both theoretical and empirical, have become frequent. For the most part, such studies
have focused on democratisation (Brinks and Coppedge 2006; Gledistch and Ward 2006;
Kopstein and Reilly 2000) and public policy. A recent example of the latter is the discussion by

Simmons et al (2006) of the spread of economic and political liberalisation around the world
from the 1980s; another is the more ambitious attempt by Braun and Gilardi (2006) to
construct a general theoretical framework for studying when and where policy diffusion is
likely to occur. A third, somewhat older discussion refers to policy convergence rather than
diffusion (Bennett 1991). Convergence does not presuppose diffusion, but there is overlap
between the concepts.
Types of diffusion
Various mechanisms of diffusion have been proposed.[8] One type that Bennett (1991:225-7)
discusses is "convergence through harmonization", which, in a European context, has
developed into probably the main conception of "Europeanisation". This perspective sees the
European Union (EU) as constituting a source of centripetal change in the policies and
institutions of its member states.[9]
Europeanisation is far from unknown in studies of political parties (Ladrech 2002; Poguntke et
al 2007). But it is probably not quite an appropriate label for the sort of change that is
addressed in this paper. True, political parties are, in one way or another, now incorporated
into quite big parts of the EU's operation (Lindberg et al 2008), nowhere more so than in the
European Parliament. What is more, the Union's treaties have progressively enhanced their
appreciation of and support for "Europarties" at the supranational level (Johansson 2009). But
this does not (yet) have much to do with national political parties. Perhaps the foremost
activity that a party engages in, the nomination of candidates in elections, still takes place at
national level, without any involvement whatsoever from Europarties. If it means anything,
Europeanisation must surely signify convergence towards some norm that emanates, in some
way, from the supranational European level. That is clearly a relevant model for national
adaptations in all sorts of policy fields: states converge because, through the EU's institutions,
they have agreed on some sort of common policy. There is as yet, however, no European
model of party, whether legal or organisational or ideological, around which national parties
might converge.
What, then, might be relevant mechanisms of party-organisational diffusion? Arguably, there
are two.
One is learning. According to Simmons et al (2006:795-9), different social sciences have
different perceptions of what learning might involve. The sort proposed by political scientists
like Haas (1992), on which a lot of neo-functionalist European-integration theory was built,
involves processes of gradually shared perceptions of problems, shared technical knowledge
about those problems and, ultimately, shared understandings of how they can best be tackled
by policy. This resembles the mechanism that Braun and Gilardi (2006:306-8) call "common
norms", created by "[s]hared socialization and repeated interactions within networks"; and it
might even end up with another mechanism that they call "taken-for-grantedness" (2006:311).
Clearly, Haas's "epistemic communities", sometimes called policy networks or policy

communities (Bennett 1991:224-5), are vital means of transmitting these shared

understandings. International organisations can be forums in which such networks are
established.
Economists, on the other hand, are readier to see learning as a form of "Bayesian updating"
(Braun and Gilardi 206:306-7), in which rational actors revise their beliefs about situations,
and their behaviour as responses to them, in the light of new information even if "nothing in
the Bayesian learning mechanism guarantees that actors will converge on 'the truth'," and even
if outcomes produced by it turn out to be socially sub-optimal (Simmons et al 2006:796).
Despite the epistemological differences between views of learning, the economist's approach
must also emphasise institutions, formal or informal, as transmission belts for these new ideas
what Holzinger and Knill (2005:790-1) call "transnational communication". In party studies,
such institutions might well include the sort of international networks that Johansson (2007,
2008) has investigated, as well as the "neighbourhood effects" (Kern et al 2007:607) that come
with physical proximity.
The final diffusion mechanism, argue Simmons et al (2006:799-801; also Holzinger and Knill
2005:784-5), is emulation.[10] This type of diffusion is said to rest on a constructivist view of
political behaviour, explicable by the meaning that the actor applies to it (Jacobsson 2009b),
especially the degree of legitimacy. Its emphasis is thus on the emulated actor rather than the
emulated action (Shipan and Volden 2008: 842-3).
Expert or policy networks that is, institutions can be relevant here, too. But, again, so can
insights from other social sciences. Reference-group theory from social psychology, for
example, suggests that "individuals emulate the behavior of their self-identified peers, even
when they cannot ascertain that doing so will in fact be in their best interests" (Simmons et al
2006:801). For the social scientist who even nods at the basic assumption of human rationality,
it might make more sense to envisage peer emulation as something akin to what Simmons et al
(in the earlier sub-section on learning, 2006:797) call "channeled learning". In such models,
"the cognitive process is dominated by an 'availability heuristic,' in which actors unable to
retrieve a full sample of information base their decisions on only those instances that are
available to them". It seems safe to assume that relative availability will be informed to a
considerable degree by the costs attendant to learning about the different instances; that those
costs will be negatively correlated with the relative familiarity of the learning actor with the
various instances; and that familiarity is likely to depend largely, if not only, on physical and
cultural proximity. If a policy maker is familiar with policy in another country, perhaps
because she has travelled there quite often, or because she can understand its language and
thus has a window on its public discourse, that will make its policy more "available" to her.[11]
So as well as being understood in constructivist terms, emulation can be seen as a rational,
albeit in a "bounded" sense (Simon 1985) a cost-minimising strategy, a cognitive short cut.
Diffusion can thus either be understood as a structural model or one of "individual choice,
since diffusion models often treat the adopter as a reflective decision-maker" (Strang and Soule

1998:266-7). In fact, the latter version is close to how diffusion is explained in a classic
sociological study, one that is of special relevance to the current paper because it focuses not
on public policy but on organisations. DiMaggio and Powell (1983:151) argue that what they
call "mimetic isomorphism", another term for which might be organisational
diffusion-by-emulation, is likelier in conditions of "uncertainty". "When organizational
technologies are poorly understood...when goals are ambiguous, or when the environment
creates symbolic uncertainty," they suggest, "organizations may model themselves on other
organizations". Such conditions might very well have applied to party builders in countries
that were undergoing or had recently undergone the collapse of the communist power
monopoly.
DiMaggio and Powell (1983:154-5) go on to hypothesise explicitly that "[t]he more uncertain
the relationship between means and ends", or "[t]he more ambiguous the goals of an
organization", then "the greater the extent to which the organization will model itself after [sic]
organizations that it perceives to be successful" (see also Jacobsson 2009b). Perhaps, then,
national parties in the EU might constitute a sort of "organisational field".[12] If so, to
post-communist party organisers, which would have been the successful party organisations to
aspire to emulate? West European ones, presumably. But some of those have, by most criteria,
been much more successful than others. And that evaluation will surely have been filtered by
the availability heuristic.
The point of the preceding review is to make the case that there is a plausible alternative to the
explanations for organisational similarity between European parties in older and younger
democracies if indeed such similarity can be shown to exist that does not rest on the
"prerequisites" assumption (cf. Collier and Messick 1975) implied in Van Biezen's (2000, 2003,
2005) work. Such an alternative would instead assume that, at least to some degree, diffusion
took place . "Policy transfer" has been studied in Central and East European parties'
programmatic orientations (Hough et al 2006), but not in terms of organisation. In the next
section, I outline the design of research that might test such a set of diffusion-based
explanations. I address case selection, the construction and operationalisation of relevant
variables, and the formulation of a hypothesis.

RESEARCH OUTLINE
Perhaps, then, diffusion-by-emulation has been an influence on the party organisations to be
found in the ex-communist democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. We require some
analytical equipment in order to test such a proposition. We need indicators and scales with
which to facilitate the measurement of party organisation, informed by relevant theory. We
need to select appropriate cases for examination. Finally, we need more detailed expectations
about what, if our proposition holds, we would expect to find. These choices are closely
connected to each other. In the following sub-sections, I suggest cases and scales, then I go on
to detail some indicators and a hypothesis.

10

Selection of cases and scales

The Baltic states are attractive cases for our inquiry, for various reasons. One is that there has
been little research undertaken on Baltic party organisation, which creates an empirical lacuna
that ought to be filled. A bigger reason is that they can be seen as containing most likely cases
(Lijphart 1971; Gerring 2007:120-2) of diffusion.
In some ways, there is little reason to expect Baltic parties to organise themselves in any
radically different way to the parties in Central Europe that we have reviewed. True, the Baltic
countries were not just Soviet satellites, like Hungary or Czechoslovakia, but were
incorporated into the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the Baltic states, like those in Central
Europe, had memories from between the world wars of national independence and varying
degrees of democracy, including parties, some of which revived after independence and
democracy were recovered. Certainly, democracy has been consolidated in the Baltic states in
rather similar ways to those observable in the other ex-communist member states, and in
contrast to democracy's faltering fortunes in the three Eastern Slavic states, Ukraine and,
especially, Russia and Belarus. For our purposes, what this means is that the Central European
patterns of party organisation discussed above inter alia, fairly weak and sparsely populated
parties-on-the-ground, strong and strengthening parties-in-central-office, unexpectedly
subordinate parties-in-public-office offers a convenient yardstick by which we might assess
Baltic parties.
Yet there is another yardstick that we can refer to. Notwithstanding the convergence between
parties in older and newer European democracies that we noted above, this second yardstick is
nevertheless conveniently distinct from what we might call the "Central European model". It is
the "Nordic model". Some of the key differences between the two models can be highlighted
with reference to a certain theoretical perspective on power relations, that of delegation
relationships.
To put it very simply, delegation models depict as the principal an actor that wants something
done, but which cannot do the job itself. The actor to which the task is instead delegated, for a
certain reward, is the agent. The principal then seeks to hold the agent accountable, so as to
make sure, in different ways, that the agent is doing what is it supposed to be doing, rather
than what it might prefer to do.[13] When Mller (2000:317-29) applies the approach to a
political party, he suggests that the story of bottom-up, intra-party democracy is actually quite
an accurate one. Party members are the ultimate principals. They delegate via two channels.
The first is through branch organisations and the party congress to an executive leadership
in other words, the party in central office. The second channel involves delegation (through
endorsement) to candidates in public elections which, if they get elected by the electorate at
large, constitute the party in public office. Both types of party agent, while not subject to recall
at any time by the principal (as, say, a government is to parliament), nevertheless have limited
terms of office. If they want to be reselected for party office, or renominated for election to

11

public office, then they have to retain the favour of the membership organisation.
Mller (2000) might have had the average Nordic party in mind when he sketched his model.
For all the general perceptions that Nordic parties have become less internally democratic and
more (to translate the Swedish expression) "top-steered" (Heidar and Saglie 2002:181-200;
Petersson et al 2000:82-7), nearly all Nordic parties can still be seen as examples of bottom-up
delegation albeit often imperfect examples, in which the principal is not always in full
control of the agent. Swedish party members in particular tend to be quite loyal to their
leaders. But when they do fall, it is still dissatisfaction among party members and sub-national
units that usually forces them to relinquish their positions. Occasionally, this happens through
an open challenge for party leadership positions. More often, the dissatisfaction is
communicated more informally, the incumbent resigns and a replacement emerges via the
recommendation an election committee, which will have discretely gauged the distribution
and preferences of the party. But this is still a form of delegation from members to leaders.
There is a similar story when it comes to delegating to candidates in public elections.
Candidate selection is decentralised in all the Nordic countries (Bille 2001; Narud et al 2002).
Incumbent MPs know that they cannot deviate too far from the preferences of the regional
levels of the party organisation (which usually coincide with the electoral districts) if they seek
renomination at the next election.
Not everyone sees the principal-agent approach as appropriate for studying intra-party
relations, not least because it is often debatable which actor is delegating to which other actor
that is, who is the principal and who is the agent. Indeed, van Houten (2009), in contrast to
Mller (2000), takes a top-down position, seeing "national leadership" as principal and
"regional branches" as agents. As explained above, I argue that the bottom-up perspective is
reasonable in most Nordic parties. But it clearly becomes inappropriate when not just the "real
story" but also the "official story" of party life (Katz and Mair 1992:6-8) violates its assumptions
as appears to happen sometimes in Central European parties. Consider, for example, an
extreme case, from Slovakia. Rybar (2003:170) reports that the Smer party has about 70
founding members, and a majority of the group can veto party congress decisions. Moreover,
"the 20-member presidency practically decides all matters of party life, including candidate
nominations and the drafting of the party election manifesto." Clearly, it is thus inappropriate
to see delegation in that party flowing upwards from members to either the party's own leaders
or its public officials.
The key distinctions between the Nordic and the Central European models of party
organisation are, then, illustrated by the application of a principal-agent perspective. Certainly,
the different models of intra-party delegation have quite a lot in common with existing party
models (see Krouwel 2006; Mller 2000:317-8). The Nordic model has many of the features of
the mass party; the Central European model might be compared to the electoral-professional
(Panebianco 1988:262-9) or the business-firm model (Hopkin and Paolucci 1999). To refer
directly to these ideal types, though, might overstate the domination of the leadership in

12

Central European parties, and understate Nordic parties' drift away from classic mass-party
features like institutionalised ties to interest groups and sub-cultural encapsulation of
supporters. In short, such reference might exaggerate the differences between the different
models of contemporary European party. A narrower focus on inductively generated regional
models allows us to concentrate on organisational aspects in which, according to the literature,
we can expect to find variation.
So why choose Baltic cases? If diffusion-by-emulation has an effect on party organisation, then
the Baltic states's parties might well display signs of such an effect. This is because there are
good reasons to suspect that the both availability heuristic and a subjective perception of
success could have induced Baltic party-entrepreneurs to have looked to the Nordic states
when they were building their parties. After all, the institutions of democracy in those
similarly small and North European countries, including their long-established parties, can be
considered successful by most measures. Nowhere is this emulation effect likelier than in
Estonia, which has geographical and linguistic proximity to one of the Nordic countries,
Finland, and close historical ties to another, Sweden. Indeed, in an interesting article,
Lagerspetz (2003:50, 55) reviews the attempts by Estonian politicians after the recovery of
independence "to change the public image of their country by redefining it as part of the
Nordic region, rather than the Baltic, East Central European or Post-Soviet regions" much,
in fact, as Finland had done after the second world war. Moreover, because there is little if any
organisational continuity between pre- and post-Soviet-era parties in Estonia (Grofman et al
2000:334-5), the slate might have been relatively clean and thus favourable for diffusion.
Some of the same geographical and historical arguments can be applied, to a lesser extent, to
Latvia. Lithuania, on the other hand, has more of a Central European position and history.
Prioritisation of cases for investigation would thus have Estonian parties at the top of the list,
then Latvian, then Lithuanian.
Indicators and hypothesis
Operationalising the ideal-typical models of Central European and Nordic parties could begin
with the party members: how many are there? These are, of course, relevant data (presented in
table 1). But perhaps not too much should be read into the absolute totals, or even the
members/electorate ratios, for each country and each party. Van Biezen et al (2009) make the
reasonable argument that membership levels have been so low in ex-communist Europe since
the end of communist rule, and (more importantly) have fallen so far in Western Europe over
roughly the same period, that they may no longer be very useful indicators of party strength.
As we saw, the impression given by many parties in the Czech Republic and Hungary has been
that they are not that bothered about increasing their memberships, whereas virtually no
Nordic partisan would admit to the same indifference. But, cushioned by public subsidies, it
can be asked how hard even Nordic party leaders really work to increase their memberships.
This, of course, is an obvious implication of the well-known cartel-party thesis (Katz and Mair
1995).

13

[Table 1 about here]

A similar point can be made about the panoply of collateral organisations (Poguntke 2002)
that at least according to the ideal type surround most Nordic parties, including youth and
women's ancillary organisations and, in the cases of most of the social democratic parties,
affiliate organisations like the blue-collar trade unions. With the odd partial exception, the
ancillary organisations are shadows of their former selves, certainly in terms of membership
and arguably also in terms of influence; and ties with affiliate organisations are much less
institutionalised and exclusive than they once were (Allern 2007; Allern et al 2008; Sundberg
2003). In these respects, Nordic parties are not that distinctive these days. Moreover, one area
in which they are distinctive namely, their high levels of sex equality in party organs and
parliamentary groups is not a feature that can readily be operationalised with a good level of
internal validity. Few Nordic parties have quota rules; it is simply customary to engineer a
balance between the sexes. Thus, sex equality in Nordic parties may be better understood as a a
broader societal indicator than one of party organisation per se.
In a way, the basic structures of the parties might not, again, be so relevant to the inquiry.
There seems little reason to expect anything very different to the pattern of territorially based
basic units; a congress that is selected in some way by those units; a national executive and
executive committee to which everyday party management is entrusted; and a parliamentary
group that represents the party in the legislature. But the relationships between those organs
are definitely of great interest, and here we can expect deviation among Baltic parties from one
or other of our models. Is (1) the congress entirely composed of delegates selected by regional
sub-units, or to some significant degree, up to the level of at least a substantial minority by
ex officio participants, such as MPs? Are (2) the national executive and the executive
committee fully selected by the congress, or are there significant ex officio placements in those
organs? Answers to these questions will determine whether it is reasonable to view party-office
holders as in any realistic sense accountable to the membership, as the Nordic model implies.
The distribution of economic resources is an natural indicator of power relations. Public
subsidies are the major component of finance for most Nordic parties (Sundberg 2002:
197-9), and the same applied in the Czech Republic and Hungary. It could be argued, then,
that public money is not really a question for party organisers, as the funding framework is
decided by the state. On the other hand, parties themselves must have colluded in parliament
in deciding the framework. And, in any case, it may be that some parties in ex-communist
Europe may not be as reliant on state subsidies as Czech and Hungarian ones are (Enyedi
2006:235). Indeed, while Estonia has a "relatively advanced" system of public subsidies (Sikk
2006:347), Latvia is one of the few European countries not to have a comprehensive subsidy
regime (Pabriks and Stokenberger 2006:62-3). As far as intra-party delegation is concerned, a
key question is: (3) are a party's local and regional units financially reliant on either its

14

executive organs, its MPs or both, or do they have their own sources? Nordic parties enjoy
public subsidies at regional and municipal levels, as well as at national level. This permits the
sub-national levels to retain the independence and to delegate upwards more effectively.
Then there is the relationship between the party organisation, at its various levels, and the
parliamentary group. This aspect of intra-party delegation is shaped through various
mechanisms. Some are exercised ex ante. Does (4) the organisation leadership play much of a
part in selecting the party's candidates in parliamentary elections (or, for that matter, local and
regional ones, too)? If the leadership possesses and uses significant powers of veto and/or
placement, as is the case in some Central European parties (Enyedi and Linek 2008:468-9),
then the parliamentary group will be much less independent of it than is the case in the Nordic
model, in which the party leadership plays little part in candidate selection.[14]
Other mechanisms come into play ex post. What (5) is the formal relationship between the
party organisation's leadership and the parliamentary group (or groups, if the party also has
MEPs)? Is, for instance, the latter formally subordinate to the former? Enyedi (2006:fn 7)
points to the problem of personal overlap between these two faces of the party; it may not be
easy to see which organ is delegating to which, because the individuals in each one will often
be the same. But some assessment can probably still be made, based largely on (6) ex officio
presence. If, for example, neither MPs nor members of the national executive have an
automatic presence at the other's meetings, it might indicate a relative independence for each
side, and thus that Nordic-type bottom-up, twin-channel delegation is possible (if not
assured). If one side enjoys a heavy automatic presence at the other's meetings, by contrast, it
might indicate the predominance of that side in the relationship. As we saw, in Czech and
Hungarian parties, it seemed to be the organisation's executive that held the whip hand. In one
of the few discussions of Baltic party organisation, however, Krupavicius (1998:483)
comments that Lithuanian MPs have a powerful position in their respective parties.

[Table 2 about here]

The overarching hypothesis, then, is that Baltic parties' organisation will resemble that of their
Nordic counterparts significantly more than it does that of their Central European counterparts.
If the hypothesis turns out to have something in it, further work on the precise mechanisms
through which the presumed diffusion-by-emulation actually occurred would be warranted
(cf. Johansson 2007, 2008).

CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, I have sought to pave the way for empirical investigation into party
organisational patterns in the Baltic states. As well as the obvious attraction of collecting data

15

on cases that have hitherto been relatively unexplored, the Baltic cases offer intriguing scope
for testing theories about the way party organisations form and develop.
In particular, there are reasonable grounds for expecting to find evidence of what DiMaggio
and Powell (1983) call "mimetic isomorphism", and which I have referred to as
diffusion-by-emulation the idea that, in the turbulent times after the fall of Soviet rule, Baltic
party entrepreneurs sought inspiration from parties in other countries that were both
relatively familiar ("available") and perceived as successful. The Nordic parties fit this bill.
Conveniently, party organisation in at least two Central European countries offers an
alternative template for how Baltic parties might look, given the prerequisites the sudden
end of communist rule, the recovery of national sovereignty, and a rapid integration into West
European institutions that both Central European and Baltic countries experienced. It could
be, therefore, that the diffusion hypothesis turns out to have weak explanatory potential, and
that common prerequisites (the period effect) are more important; or it may be that other
variables, such as ideology (Enyedi and Linek 2008), turn out to be influential.
In the last part of the paper, I sketched a model of party organisation, based on the act of
delegation by principal to agent, that serves to illustrate some of the distinctive aspects of party
organisation in the Nordic countries, particularly where those aspects contrast with the
features reported by research into party structures in Central Europe. The advantage over
using these models as yardsticks by which to evaluate party organisation in the Baltic states is
that they do not overstate the differences between Nordic and Central European parties. In
reality, the differences between parties in these two parts of Europe may well be not that great,
and may be diminishing. Still, the question of whether bottom-up or top-down delegation is
the more realistic and analytically useful perspective on internal party life is another, broader
question that is well worth exploring empirically.

16

Table 1. Party membership and members/electorate ratios

period

M/E change

latest M/E

Denmark

1998-2008

- 1.01

4.13

Finland

1998-2006

- 1.57

8.08

Norway

1997-2007

- 2.16

5.15

Sweden

1998-2008

- 1.67

3.87

Czech Republic

1999-2008

- 1.45

1.99

Hungary

1999-2008

- 0.61

1.54

Estonia

2002-2008

+ 1.53

4.87

Latvia

0.74

2004-2007

+ 0.61

2.66

Lithuania

Source: van Biezen at al (2009).

17

Table 2. Summary of indicators and models

"Nordic model"

"Central European model"

Party-office channel
(1)

Party congress composition

Delegates elected by
sub-national units

Significant proportion of
delegates ex officio

(2)

Selection of party
executive organs

Selected by congress

Significant proportion of
members ex officio

(3)

Distribution of party income

Sub-national units have

own income sources or
channel income upwards

National level controls

income, channels income
downwards

Public-office channel
(4)

Selection of parliamentary
candidates

Regional process,
leadership uninvolved

Leadership heavily involved

(5)

Status of MPs vis--vis party

executive

Formally or implicitly
independent

Formally subordinate

(6)

Attendance at MPs meetings

MPs only

Party organisation
representatives present

18

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Notes
[1] The project is entitled the Nordic Model of Democracy: Diffusion, Competititon, Europeanisation
(www.nmd-project.net). It is part of the Nordic Spaces research programme, funded by a consortium of research
councils led by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
[2] Van Biezen (2003) also looked at two other relatively young but not ex-communist democracies, Portugal and
Spain.
[3] Enyedi (1996) calls this a "subcultural party". Kopecky (2007:126) reports another exception, the
Hungarian-speakers' party in Slovakia. Indeed, Enyedi and Linek (2008:464-6) report how, more recently, Fidesz
and, to a lesser extent, the Czech Civic Democrats have made their parties more complex and entwined with other
civic organisations albeit in processes steered by the party leadership.
[4] Kopecky (2003:138, 2007:134) and Hanley (2001:470-1) report something similar in comparable Czech
parties.
[5] In Slovakia, until about 2000, "it can even be claimed that every major intra-party dispute ended up in a
break-up of the party" (Rybar 2003:163).
[6] See, for example, Kopecky (2003:142, 2007:130-1) on Czech parties.
[7] As Enyedi (2006:236) understandably protests, "It is hardly acceptable...to regard individualistic party choice
as a mature form of electoral behaviour when it is observed in the West, but as a sign of immaturity if it comes
from the East."
[8] Two mechanisms that will not be considered further here are coercion (Simmons et al 2006:790; see also
Bennett 1991:227; Braun and Gilardi 2006:309) and competition (Simmons et al 206:792). Neither of these forms
of diffusion or convergence seems terribly salient to our inquiry. Competition might well be relevant for party
organisation within a state. But it is not likely to be a cause of transnational convergence.
[9] Radaelli (2000b:3) defines Europeanisation as "[p]rocesses of (a) construction, (b) diffusion and (c)
institutionalization of formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, 'ways of doing things' and
shared beliefs and norms which are first defined and consolidated in the making of EU decisions and then
incorporated in the logic of domestic discourse, identities, political structures and public policies."
[10] Jacobsson (2009a) refers to "imitation", Braun and Gilardi (2008:311-2) to "symbolic imitation".
[11] "Perhaps the most common finding in diffusion research is that spatially proximate actors influence each
other...spatial proximity facilitates all kinds of interaction and influence" (Strang and Soule 1998:275). Brinks and
Coppedge (2006:467) refer to "neighbor emulation".
[12] Radaelli (2000a) and Crum and Fossum (2009) approach in a similar way two other aspects of European
integration policy and parliamentary organisation, respectively.
[13] A concise but rather fuller outline of the approach can be found in Lupia (2003).
[14] Back in the late 1990s Pettai and Kreuzer (1998:162) could note that "candidate recruitment among Baltic
parties remains weakly institutionalized and wide open to entrepreneurial newcomers".

25