Most contemporary analyses resist studying parties for what they obviously are: organizations. This resistance is partly due to the objective difficulties in an organizational analysis of parties. But it is also the result of widespread prejudices and attitudes in the literature on parties that create barriers between the observer and the object observed.

Angelo Panebianco (1988: 3): Political Parties

Is the party over?

Not too long ago, the renowned political theorist Simon Tormey (2015) published a short and punchy book, entitled The End of Representative Politics. One might have expected a question mark at the end of the title, but the book’s name is phrased as a bold proposition rather than a question to be debated – this is the end. On the cover, a diverse group of stick figures turn their backs on a sign saying ‘vote here’, while marching towards some kind of unknown destination, presumably beyond the formal political system. The book’s main thesis is simple: people across the world are increasingly abandoning representative politics in favour of extra-parliamentarian modes of political organization such as social movements, activist networks or online communities. According to Tormey, politics is gradually becoming an individualized activity that may concern common causes but is performed by discrete and heterogeneous individuals rather than unified and homogeneous groups. This development is very much driven by the emergence of new information and communication technologies that afford what W Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg (2012) call ‘connective action’, but it is also fuelled by a more general desire for speaking and acting on one’s own behalf instead of being governed by representatives (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001).

Hence, we are moving towards an ‘immediate or non-mediated’ kind of politics (Tormey, 2015: 2), where individuals have realized that democratic politics is not the same as representative politics; and the first casualty of that realization is obviously the political party, with its supposedly myopic ideologies and hierarchical lines of command. As Tormey puts it (pp 90–91):

So what, then, is the fate of the mass party? Decline, so it would seem, to a point where they become withered imitations of the once great organizations they used to be. What is left, as political commentators often note, are post-ideological ‘brands’ with vague connotations that help them to differentiate themselves from other offerings in the political supermarket. … Political parties are now much less bearers of distinct visions than vehicles for rival leadership groups seeking power.

Plenty of signs in the present seem to support Tormey’s thesis. For instance, party membership is approaching rock bottom in most corners of the world, particularly in countries like the UK and France where fewer than 2 per cent of the population are registered as rank and file (van Biezen et al, 2012), although the UK has experienced a slight overall increase in recent years (see Seyd, 2020). Similarly, voter turnout has plummeted worldwide since the middle of the 20th century, currently at a level well below 70 per cent in many countries (Solijonov, 2016). Voters’ tendency to identify with specific parties is likewise declining due to the reconfiguration of class-consciousness and the emergence of ‘liquid loyalties’ in the electorate (Ignazi, 2017: 201). Finally, people’s trust in political parties is at an all-time low, with politicians deemed less trustworthy than complete strangers and more dishonest than second-hand car dealers (Newton et al, 2018). As such, it seems fair to conclude, as many have recently done, that the party is – or, perhaps, should be – over (for example Holloway, 2002; Day, 2005; Rosanvallon, 2008; Keane, 2009; Castells, 2012; della Porta, 2013; Hardt and Negri, 2017).

To paraphrase Mark Twain, however, the reports of the party’s pending death are greatly exaggerated. Financially at least, political parties have never been stronger. Owing particularly to a significant increase in public funding since the 1980s, parties are today more resourceful than ever before. In fact, most European parties receive more than two thirds of their income from state subsidies alone, and some are almost exclusively funded by public resources (Falguera et al, 2014). This tendency has given rise to the much-debated ‘cartel party thesis’, which extends the seminal work of Robert Michels (1915) by suggesting that party organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on the state – not their members – for survival (Katz and Mair, 1995 and 2009). On top of this, a range of countries across the world are currently going through a process of ‘constitutionalizing’ political parties, thereby acknowledging them legally as ‘desirable and procedurally necessary for the effective functioning of democracy’ (van Biezen, 2012: 187). The combination of growing public discontent and widespread state consolidation has thus created a paradoxical situation in which political parties are as powerful as ever, yet increasingly seen as illegitimate representatives of common interests (Ignazi, 2017).

At the same time, new ‘challenger parties’ (De Vries and Hobolt, 2020) have recently emerged across the political spectrum and created a much-needed sense of party revitalization in Europe and elsewhere. Podemos in Spain, Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy, Syriza in Greece, Feminist Initiative in Sweden, France Insoumise, the Momentum faction of Labour in Britain, the International Pirate Party, the pan-European Diem25, and many other radical contenders have contributed to this development. With inspiration from the inclusive and democratic spirit of ‘square protests’ such as Occupy Wall Street and 15M (Prentoulis and Thomassen, 2013), these parties have sought to translate the conventional approach to party organization by introducing social movement principles and practices to the electoral arena (della Porta et al, 2017). For instance, Podemos initially structured its organization around ‘circles’ where members and non-members could meet and discuss political issues in the absence of formal hierarchies (Pavía et al, 2016). Similarly, Movimento 5 Stelle successfully exploited the mobilizing affordances of digital platforms to become one of the most popular formations in Italian politics (Deseriis, 2020), and the international Pirate Parties generally created their success on the basis of bottom-up policy making (Almqvist, 2016). Towards the other end of the political spectrum, parties like the far-right Alternative Für Deutschland have similarly reconfigured German politics by relying heavily on social media for generating support and coordinating events, whereas the Dutch anti-Islam PVV has gone the opposite direction by creating a party with only one member (Mazzoleni and Voerman, 2017).

Such innovations within the formal political system point directly to the need for a deeper understanding of how these new contenders orchestrate their internal affairs, and how their novel modes of operation challenge conventional practices and procedures. However, the established literature on party organization tends to focus exclusively on topics that tell us very little about what Katarina Barrling (2013) calls ‘the inner life of the party’. While we currently know quite a bit about things such as voter demographics, membership modalities, income sources, campaign strategies and methods for candidate selection, we know surprisingly little about what actually goes on beneath the glossy surface of party organizations (Borz and Janda, 2020; Heidar, 2020; Faucher, 2021; Gauja and Kosiara-Pedersen, 2021). In fact, the literature on party organization has even been characterized as empirically unsophisticated, precisely because it often fails to account for what is going on inside the party machine (for example Noel, 2010).

This is why, as Kaare Strøm and Wolfgang Müller (1999: 12) suggest, we need to find ways of opening the ‘black box’ of party organization. Fortunately, one breed of researchers is particularly skilled in this regard: organization scholars. The problem is, however, that organization scholars – particularly the ‘critical’ kind – seem to have very little interest in political parties. In a sense, organization scholars closely mirror the general public’s tendency to disregard parties as important and relevant objects of interest, preferring instead to focus on ‘alternative’ and extra-parliamentarian modes of organizing (Husted et al, 2021 and 2022; Parker, 2021). The overall ambition of this book is to convince organization scholars and academics with similar proclivities that this is a mistake and to show them that there is much to be gained from studying parties as organizations.

The politics of organization and the organization of politics

Organization scholars have always been interested in politics. Not only does the discipline that today calls itself Organization and Management Studies (or OMS) often trace its century-old pedigree back to the work of political sociologists like Karl Marx, Max Weber and Mary Parker Follett (for example, Adler, 2009), some of the first research projects that openly claimed to be concerned with organizational issues centred on political organizations such as trade unions, social movements and political parties. Weber, for instance, derived a great deal of his insights on charismatic leadership and bureaucratic authority from first-hand experiences with the German Social Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party (Lassman and Spiers, 1994). Similarly, Follett used her own personal engagement with activist neighbourhood groups in the Boston area as a foundation for her visionary theses on organizational democracy and creativity (Ansell, 2009). Other pioneers of organization theory, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Moisei Ostrogorski and Robert Michels, wrote explicitly about political parties but formulated their contributions to the discipline in more general terms (see Lipset, 1964; Swedberg, 2009; Diefenbach, 2019). In fact, one might even view OMS as a splinter-discipline that grew out of early political sociology.

For decades, the foundational interest in politics heavily influenced the work of organization scholars. However, towards the end of the 20th century, the focus on what might be called the organization of politics (the internal orchestration of collectives that openly engage with political issues) gradually gave way to a more general focus on the politics of organization, understood as intra-organizational struggles about means and ends in seemingly non-political enterprises (Mayes and Allen, 1977; Drory and Romm, 1990; Fleming and Spicer, 2007). The interest in the politics of organization intensified in the early 1990s with the emergence of the sub-field known as Critical Management Studies (see Adler et al, 2007) and is particularly visible in academic literature on the ‘micropolitics’ of various organizational phenomena (Contu and Willmott, 2003; Swan and Scarbrough, 2005; Wright et al, 2012).

Recently, however, a renewed interest in the organization of politics has emerged within organization studies. This has resulted in refreshing empirical work on different kinds of political organizations, such as worker collectives (for example Kokkinidis, 2015), NGOs (for example Dyck and Silvestre, 2019), activist networks (for example Sutherland et al, 2014), alternative organizations (for example Reedy et al, 2016) and large-scale social movements (for example Reinecke, 2018). However, one type of political organization has been almost entirely neglected: the political party. Considering the important role that parties play in contemporary society (Rosenblum, 2008), it is surprising how little attention has been paid to these political behemoths within organization studies. A quick search through some of the most well-read journals in the field shows that, save for a few exceptions (such as Moufahim et al, 2015; Husted and Plesner, 2017; Ringel, 2019; Sinha et al, 2021), hardly any studies investigate parties from a truly organizational point of view. Even independent journals that focus explicitly on the intersection of politics and organization, such as ephemera or Tamara, had, until very recently, only published one or two pieces on topics related to parties (for an exception, see issue 21(2) of ephemera).

One can only speculate about the reasoning behind organization scholars’ lack of interest in political parties. In my view, there are two apparent reasons, both of which are highlighted by Angelo Panebianco (1988: 3) in the opening epigraph of this chapter. The first has to do with ‘the objective difficulties in an organizational analysis of parties’. Compared with so many other organizations, political parties are difficult study objects. Not only are they, due to their heavy reliance on public support, incredibly sensitive about their public image and therefore not particularly inclined to give researchers access to their internal affairs, they are also relatively difficult to anonymize for purposes of confidentiality, especially in two-party systems. Moreover, political parties have porous boundaries, which makes it difficult for researchers to establish where the organization begins and ends (who are members of the organization, and who can speak on its behalf?). Finally, given the highly politicized nature of electoral politics, research on political parties can easily be read as partisan or biased, particularly if it is based on qualitative data such as interviews and observations rather than hard numbers or ‘official’ material produced by the parties themselves (see Katz and Mair, 1992).

Taken together, these things make political parties unattractive study objects for organization scholars, many of whom are used to studying cases that are relatively accessible, demarcatable and presumably non-political. However, there is another reason why organization scholars might prefer not to study political parties. It has to do with those ‘widespread prejudices and attitudes in the literature on parties that create barriers between the observer and the object observed’ (Panebianco, 1988: 3). To fully appreciate the extent of these attitudes and prejudices, we need briefly to consider the history of political parties as an unpopular yet prevalent mode of political organization.

A crude history of parties

Save for a few ‘golden’ decades after the Second World War (Mair, 1994: 2), political parties have always had a bad name. The first signs of partisanship arguably appeared in ancient Greece around 400 AD (Osborne, 2010), although the currently dominant understanding of a political party as a ‘team of men [sic!] seeking to control the governing apparatus by gaining office in a duly constituted election’ (Downs, 1957: 25) is clearly the product of a ‘modernising topos’ (Anastasiadis, 1999). Back then, political leaders did indeed form small groups among themselves, but, since ancient Greek city-states were direct democracies and not representative democracies, modern conceptions of parties sit uneasily with ancient understandings of dēmokratia (Hansen, 2014). As George Tridimas (2019: 988) puts it:

There was no party alteration in government the way it is understood in modern democracies. Contrary to representative democracies where the government typically initiates legislation, in Athens citizens brought issues for discussion to the Council and the Assembly. Political leaders did not propose legislation in any official capacity, but as private citizens.

Hence, if members of assemblies formed partisanships, ‘they did so on an ad hoc basis and readily dissolved them’ (Hammond, 1988: 521). One reason why ancient Greeks were quick to dissolve any kind of political groupings is that notions of factionalism, later engrained in the word party (from the Latin verb partire, meaning to divide), was almost unanimously criticized by leading figures of ancient Greece for corrupting ‘holist’ understandings of the common good (Rosenblum, 2008). Plato, for instance, was adamant about the need for the Republic to act as a ‘unified, harmonious and stable polis, with no source of dissension or rivalry’ (Brown, 1998: 13–14). Parties, by their very nature, create dissension and rivalry. In fact, they have ‘partiality and opposition as their aim’ (Rosenblum, 2008: 11). As such, parties were frowned upon – or, rather, unthinkable – in ancient Greece.

The negative connotations associated with parties or factions were later solidified by Roman thinkers such as Cicero and Sallust who, perhaps even more forcefully, underscored the problems of promoting partial interests at the expense of society as a whole. Cicero, for instance, repeatedly argued that ‘only harmony among the parts sets the conditions for the best government, just as the complementary functioning of bodily organs keeps a person healthy’ (Ignazi, 2017: 12). Such conceptions of Res Publica laid the foundation for a profound scepticism towards all kinds of partisan expression, which came to dominate political thinking for almost two millennia and shape the common understanding of state-building in the early modern period, with Thomas Hobbes’ notion of Leviathan as the most obvious example. As David Hume (1742: 33) later put it in his polemic essay ‘Of parties in general’: ‘As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honoured and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated.’

The contours of modern party politics emerged in the middle of the 17th century when English politicians cautiously began forming groups in Westminster, according to the old Tory-Whig rivalry (Ostrogorski, 1902). However, political parties with actual members ‘on the ground’ (outside parliament) did not appear in Europe until the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, where the Jacobin Clubs proliferated across France. What makes the Jacobins the first example of a proper party is that they not only managed to organize members of the National Assembly around a common strategy of protecting the outcome of the revolution from the aristocracy, they also subjugated these parliamentarians to ‘one of the most effective party machines in history’ (Brinton, 1961: 18). Although the Jacobin Clubs were later disbanded due to the combined pressures of anti-association laws and the Reign of Terror, the seeds for the emergence of the political party as the dominant template for political organization had been sown.

The resurgence of European democracies after the Second World War further confirmed the (pluralist) party system’s role in guaranteeing democracy. At this point, mass parties gained legitimacy by manifesting a way to channel the political demands of previously excluded parts of the electorate along a left/right scale based on class distinctions spawned by industrialization (Neumann, 1956). This meant that ‘the party’ became the main object of class-based identification, with some parts of the electorate (most notably trade union members) automatically enrolled as rank and file (Wilson, 1974). In Denmark, for instance, almost 30 per cent of the electorate were members of political parties in 1950 (Kosiara-Pedersen, 2017: 29) and similar numbers can be identified in most other European countries (Kölln, 2016). However, with the post-industrial turn of the 1970s and 1980s, this logic became less evident. As children of the industrial revolution, mass parties had problems reflecting postmodern concerns over gender, ethnicity and environmentalism, and even greater difficulties responding to the increasing demands for intra-party democratization (Ignazi, 2017). On top of this, ‘the party’ became associated with atrocities of the 20th century, committed by fascist regimes in Europe and elsewhere, and therefore seen by many (at least on the political left) as an organizational model that led more or less directly to the concentration camp (Parker, 2021).

As popular support for mass parties once again declined, they transformed into what has been described as ‘cartel parties’ (Katz and Mair, 1995). Significant for the cartel party is that it forms stronger bonds with the state and collects more state funding, thereby becoming less dependent on the recruitment of members (see Chapter 4). The cartel party is thus less of a popular movement and more of a career route for politicians and functionaries. This development has arguably contributed to the current disillusionment with parties unfolded earlier: low party membership, low voter-turnout and low trust in politicians. The perceived decline of political parties goes hand in hand with the rise of ‘new’ social movements since the late 1960s and the subsequent proliferation of digital activism in the early 2000s. As Tormey (2015) shows, these movements resist not only the stifling ideological messages that are so characteristic of political parties but also their hierarchical mode of organization, preferring instead to organize according to ‘subactivist’ (Bakardjieva, 2009) principles that prefigure a more democratic, inclusive and individuating society (Monticelli, 2022).

In short, the party has fallen out of fashion, in the wider public and in the academic literature (see Dean, 2016). Holism, understood as the idea that ‘political society should be a unity and that divisions are morally unwholesome and politically fatal’ (Rosenblum, 2008: 25), is back on the agenda. The result is that researchers today increasingly prefer to study super-inclusive social movements and super-democratic activist networks rather than political parties (du Plessis and Husted, 2022). As argued earlier, this tendency is perhaps nowhere as visible as within organization studies.

Why study parties as organizations?

The argument advanced earlier is a simplification. There might be many different reasons why organization scholars disregard political parties as interesting and relevant study objects. I maintain, however, that the two causes highlighted by Panebiaco (1988) continue to hold validity: parties are not only difficult to study, they are also difficult to love. If we accept the argument that we, as organization scholars and social scientists more broadly, should try to overcome these two challenges and start studying parties as organizations, one important question begs an answer: why? There are many things that are difficult to study and difficult to love but lack genuine scientific value. So, what makes parties interesting, besides the fact that they are hegemonic characters in contemporary Western society? Or, more precisely, what makes parties interesting study objects for organization scholars?

A few years ago, I published an article in the journal Organization Studies with Mona Moufahim and Martin Fredriksson (Husted et al, 2022). In the article, we highlight five reasons why organization scholars should take an interest in political parties. Based on these five reasons, we maintain that organization scholars can use parties as ‘critical cases’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006) that allow us to zoom in on dynamics that may be concealed or even suppressed in seemingly non-political organizations such as traditional business firms and public agencies, or even in other voluntary organizations. This does not mean that these characteristics are unique to parties. It merely means that they are more visible and therefore potentially more rewarding to study in party organizations. What follows is an overview of these main points.

First, political parties are interesting study objects for organization scholars because they, more than most other organizations, have to engage actively with strategies of exclusion and inclusion. While in-group and out-group dynamics clearly exist in all organizations (Luhmann, 2018), and perhaps particularly so in membership associations (Solebello et al, 2016), political parties rely much more explicitly on the exclusion of ideological dissidents to define and demarcate themselves from competing actors in the political landscape (Karthikeyan et al, 2016). For instance, while few business firms would admit to discriminating against certain groups in terms of recruitment or promotion (such as women or immigrants), several parties on the far-right openly commit such exclusionary practices. So, political parties exemplify how constructions of organizational identities are never ethically or politically neutral as they always rely on the exclusion of certain interests and identities. Even parties that might be considered inclusive or progressive rely on exclusions to bolster their own organizational identity (Husted, 2018). Although this is perhaps not an entirely novel observation, the detailed examination of exclusion and inclusion processes within political parties could help organization scholars illustrate more vividly the political constitution of any given organization (see Moufahim et al, 2015).

Second, political parties tend to conduct their infighting in the open. While most organizations go to great lengths to hide internal conflicts (Contu, 2019), parties are often inclined – perhaps even forced – to display and act out their internal conflicts in public. Sometimes, this reflects a commitment to transparency and democracy (Ringel, 2019); in other cases, competing fractions use public attention for strategic purposes (Kelly, 1990). Additionally, since parties typically represent a highly formalized mode of organization, their structural configuration is often geared to address internal conflicts, providing spaces such as annual conferences and political rallies where internal struggles can unfold and be observed in real time (Faucher-King, 2005; Faucher, 2021). This habit of openly displaying internal conflicts makes political parties particularly suited for studying how such struggles unfold in practice, and how they produce certain organizational effects that would otherwise be hidden from public view (see Sinha et al, 2021).

Third, political parties rely heavily on active members who are committed without being contracted in any meaningful sense. Since the vast majority of party workers are not employed or salaried, their willingness to sacrifice time and money to work voluntarily for a political party reflects a strong normative and affective commitment to the organization (Husted, 2020). In fact, unlike social movements and activist networks, political parties usually charge members with subscription fees, thereby rendering the entry barriers extremely high and the exit barriers equally low. Recalling the perhaps most recognized definition of organizational commitment as a ‘partisan’ and ‘affective’ attachment to the goals and values of an organization beyond its ‘purely instrumental worth’ (Buchanan, 1974: 533), political parties provide good case studies for investigating more closely how such commitment is forged and maintained in voluntary associations. They also allow scholars to theorize what technologies are conducive in terms of building strong commitment to certain progressive values such as democracy and democratic participation.

Fourth, as they are created and maintained by committed volunteers, political parties must rely on other modes of discipline compared with most conventional organizations. The fact that very few active members are employed or contracted also means that parties have weaker formal means to control their members than employee-based organizations have (such as legal sanctions or material incentives). Political parties are thus forced to rely primarily on normative control mechanisms to ensure that members stay ‘on board’ and ‘in line’ (Rye, 2015). As such, what is sometimes described as ‘party discipline’ may be seen as an intensified version of traditional normative control, as observed in other kinds of organization (Willmott, 1993), which is why it makes sense to think of parties more generally as critical cases of normative control regimes. As such, parties can help us understand these mechanisms in general and the political dimension of normative control in particular.

Finally, political parties are currently involved in a transition from bureaucracies to platforms that is fundamentally reshaping many parts of society and its organizations (Deseriis and Vittori, 2019). Hence, the present represents a particularly interesting time to engage more closely with parties as organizations, since contemporary parties have been forced to reconsider their modus operandi in light of recent technological developments (Ignazi, 2017). The rise of social media platforms as a dominant means of interaction reshapes how political parties communicate with followers and foes and is beginning to affect their very organizational structures (Almqvist, 2016). A new generation of ‘digital parties’ are increasingly employing platform technologies and logics to enhance internal communication and democracy (Gerbaudo, 2019). Such new party models are relevant for organization scholars because they draw inspiration from the world of business and their success represents an example of profound institutional change.

Taken together, these five characteristics make political parties interesting and relevant study objects that organization scholars should not neglect (nor leave to political scientists). One of the many merits of organization scholars is their ability to penetrate the glossy surface of organizations and uncover the informal dynamics that help constitute social systems. Leveraging this ability in relation to political parties would undoubtedly bring many valuable insights about parties in particular and organizations in general. To make such contributions, organization scholars must of course familiarize themselves with the established literature on party organization. A secondary aim of this book, besides convincing organization scholars that parties are indeed interesting, is to assist them in this endeavour. The following section, therefore, reviews four waves of literature on political parties. Coincidentally, these four waves also represent four more or less distinct perspectives on party organization. The remaining chapters in this book are structured according to these four perspectives, and what follows is therefore a short summary of what is to come.

Four waves, four perspectives

The four perspectives considered in this book can all be given names that begin with C (perhaps this makes them easier to remember): the classical perspective, the configurational perspective, the comparative perspective and the cultural perspective. While the first three are well established in the conventional literature on party organization, the fourth is still in its infancy. In a way, the cultural perspective represents my own attempt to assemble the relatively small amount of work that has been done on parties within organization studies, in an attempt to give it a common name and therefore an honest chance of competing with the three original perspectives. As always, categorizations rest on simplifications. Some might argue that the configurational and the comparative perspectives overlap too much, or that a fifth perspective should be added. At the end of the day, this is my reading of the literature. Hopefully, it provides some clarity and helps organization scholars embark on a quest to study parties as organizations.

First wave: the classical perspective

As already shown, parties or factions have been at the centre of intellectual debates about politics at least since classical antiquity, although their democratic legitimacy remained in short supply until the late 19th century, where the rise of mass parties successfully challenged holist ideas about harmony and consensus (Ignazi, 2017). The acceptance of parties as integral to electoral politics thus coincides with the birth of political sociology as a hybrid discipline that overlaps with early organization studies (Adler, 2009) in its focus on issues that previously had been neglected by political scientists and classical sociologists (Sartori, 1969). This newfound interest for hitherto black-boxed phenomena is, in many ways, what fuelled the first wave of party organization studies. One example is Michels’ (1915) canonical exposé of oligarchic tendencies in European socialist parties and trade unions. Having personally experienced how these otherwise democratic organizations slowly grew into bureaucratic machines and eventually succumbed to elite rule, Michels formulated his ‘iron law of oligarchy’, which would come to dominate studies of political parties for decades and has influenced research well beyond political sociology (Tolbert and Hiatt, 2009). As Michels (1915: 365) famously put it: ‘It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization says oligarchy.’

Michels’ explanation for this seemingly inevitable drift towards elite rule is that, whenever a party gains maturity and influence, it becomes dependent on the state for survival. Its leaders then acquire an interest in preserving their own position in the formal political system and seek to defend their hard-won privileges. Hence, instead of trying to overthrow the established system and realize its own radical aspirations, the party’s attention settles on the aggregation of members and the consolidation of power within the system. As such, it is no longer interested in fighting political opponents in the name of the greater good, only in outbidding them for personal and political gains. Rather than a means to achieve ‘definite ends’, the organization suddenly becomes an end in itself. According to Michels (1915: 333), there is thus a certain conservatism embedded in the ‘nature of organization’, which means that oligarchy is not unique to a certain type of party (socialist parties), but can potentially be found in any organization that pursues power and influence (Diefenbach, 2019).

This way of thinking about ‘democratic aristocracy’ (Michels, 1915: 43) as a phenomenon inherent to political organizations is likewise reflected in other founding texts within political sociology such as Follett’s (1918) work on group organizations and Weber’s (1919) writings on ‘politics as a vocation’. However, the strong anti-party sentiment that undergirds Michels’ analysis of oligarchy is perhaps most visibly expressed in one of the first texts to contemplate issues pertaining to party organization, namely Ostrogorski’s (1902) seminal two-volume treatise, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. Committed to unravelling the historical circumstances leading to the rise of parties in America and Great Britain, Ostrogorski’s work is perhaps best described as an inquiry into the pathologies of party-based government in general. The thesis that drives the text is that the formal inclusion of the masses in representative democracy spawned an unprecedented need for political association, which was accommodated by party organizations. In this sense, parties serve a perfectly legitimate function by ensuring the smooth workings of the governmental machinery. What makes them pathological, according to Ostrogorski (1902: 539), is that they fail ‘miserably’ in ‘upholding the paramount power of the citizen’ because party organizations tend to curb individuality and silence independent thinking. To remedy these shortcomings, Ostrogorski famously proposed an abolition of all ‘permanent’ parties.

Anticipating the work of Michels and Follett in particular, Ostrogorski thus identifies ‘organization’ as the main problem with party-based democracy. To these writers, the process of uniting citizens in hierarchical chains of command has a disciplining effect on the group, which limits individual freedom and undermines the revolutionary potential of democracy. Besides the shared disdain for political parties and their self-preserving nature, what characterizes the classical perspective on party organization is its inductive line of reasoning, whereby in-depth studies of a few selected cases provide the basis for formulating general social laws. A final characteristic of the classical perspective is the essayistic style of writing that allows the authors to blend sociological descriptions with moral judgements and to infuse their arguments with passion and indignation. Perhaps this is one reason why their work has had such lasting effects on political science and sociology.

Second wave: the configurational perspective

The second wave of party organization literature begins with Maurice Duverger’s (1954) efforts to reinvigorate the scientific programme, initially announced by the above-mentioned writers, with the title of his most famous book Political Parties revealing a clear intertextual link to Michels’ work in particular (also called Political Parties). Unlike these authors, however, Duverger introduces a completely new level of systematism. Instead of merely pointing to certain tendencies in electoral politics, his aim is to develop a ‘general theory of parties’ in order to show how ‘present-day parties are distinguished far less by their programme or the class of their members than by the nature of their organization’ (Duverger, 1954: xiii–xv). Duverger pursues this task through a three-fold focus on structure, membership and leadership. While all three themes are approached in genuinely new ways, his framework for analysing party structures marks the most solid milestone in the literature on party organization. Duverger starts by separating ‘direct’ parties (established and driven by members) from ‘indirect’ parties (established and driven by outside organizations such as unions or the Catholic Church). He then proceeds to the argument that all parties consist of a number of ‘basic elements’, four of which are prevalent: caucuses, branches, cells and militias (Duverger, 1954: 17).

Whereas caucuses (small elite units) are the basic elements of conservative parties as well as US parties in general, branches (large mass units) function as building blocks in labour parties and Catholic parties; and, while cells (clandestine occupational groups) are the sine qua non of communist parties, militias (highly disciplined private armies) constitute the backbone of fascist parties. This typology sets the scene for the rest of the book. Duverger consistently uses it to confirm his initial proposition about organizational configurations being the defining factor in distinguishing one party from another. For instance, caucus-based parties (also called ‘cadre parties’) are characterized as having a very small but active membership base, while branch-based parties (‘mass parties’) are described as operating with a large but more passive pool of members. Similarly, although most parties are said to exhibit some degree of oligarchy, the means for achieving and legitimizing elite rule varies, with militia-based parties openly embracing it due to the ‘divinity’ of their leaders, and cell-based parties disguising it through an elaborate system of ‘indirect representation’ (Duverger, 1954: 138).

Several of Duverger’s contemporaries embraced his systematic approach and shared his focus on organizational structure as the primary unit of analysis (including Neumann, 1956; Eldersveld, 1964; Epstein, 1967). Many also continued the scientific programme of synthesizing; that is, of developing ideal types and categorizing parties accordingly. One noteworthy example is Otto Kirchheimer’s (1966) account of the transformation of Western European party systems, caused by the gradual emergence of what he famously dubbed the ‘catch-all party’. To some extent, catch-all parties resemble mass parties organizationally, in the sense that enrolling and coordinating large numbers of rank and file is a key ambition. Unlike mass parties, however, catch-all parties are characterized by a watering down of their ideological stance. A weak ideological position allows the parties to cater for the ‘median voter’ – the mass of citizens at the middle of the political spectrum (Downs, 1957) – and to secure political power by ‘catching all’. The effectiveness of the catch-all strategy has, according to Kirchheimer, resulted in parties imitating each other politically as well as organizationally, thereby causing significant changes in party systems across Western Europe.

What sets Duverger’s and Kirchheimer’s contributions apart from those of Ostrogorski and Michels is their systematism, their focus on organizational configurations and their efforts to group rather different parties into homogeneous categories (caucus, mass, catch-all and so on). Common themes across both waves of literature include a preference for inductive lines of reasoning, where selected cases provide the empirical basis for widespread generalizations and the conviction that parties are only minimally impacted by their societal context. Kirchheimer’s (1966) catch-all thesis is telling in both regards. However, both characteristics are challenged by the rise of the third wave of party organization literature and the emergence of a properly comparative perspective.

Third wave: the comparative perspective

The third wave of party organization literature is inaugurated by yet another book entitled Political Parties (Panebianco, 1988). While the exact reason for this case of title isomorphism remains unknown, the work of Panebianco is certainly indebted to Michels’ Political Parties and Duverger’s Political Parties, in the sense that all three books share a persistent focus on the organization as the primary unit of analysis. What sets parties apart is thus not so much their political programme or voter demographic, but their organizational dynamics. Panebianco’s contribution to this research agenda is to turn Michels’ interest in the internal organization of parties and Duverger’s preoccupation with organizational structures into a framework for empirical analysis. The purpose of creating such a framework is, for Panebianco, to advance an approach he calls ‘comparative-historical analysis’, which enables researchers to move beyond single-case studies and ‘isolate similarities and differences between the various cases’ of political parties (Panebianco, 1988: xiv). To aid him in this endeavour, Panebianco turns to one of the most dominant organization theories of all times, namely contingency theory.

Panebianco’s contingency theory of party organization begins with the proposition that political parties can be distinguished based on two factors: their history and their environment. In terms of history, parties tend to uphold political and administrative decisions made by their founders, even when these have proven unwise or outdated. In terms of environment, parties are influenced by a variety of contingencies, such as changing laws, sources of finance, intra-party competition and technological developments, as well as electoral results. This starting point introduces a new kind of dynamism to the static models developed by Duverger and his contemporaries because it acknowledges the often-neglected point that ‘a party (like any organization) is a structure in motion which evolves over time, reacting to external changes and to the changing “environment” in which it functions’ (Panebianco, 1988: 49). Based on this premise, Panebianco develops a framework for measuring the level of institutionalization achieved by a given party at a given point in time. The more institutionalized a party is, the more autonomous it is with regard to its environment, and the less likely it is to change its structure.

The conception of a political party as an open system determined by environmental conditions, rather than as a closed community living ‘according to its own laws’ (Duverger, 1954: 84), is well aligned with other contributions to the comparative perspective. One example is Joseph Schleisinger’s (1984: 390) characterization of parties as ‘forms of organized trial and error’, another is Kay Lawson and Peter Merkl’s (1988: 5) description of party failure as something that occurs when parties ‘do not perform the function they are expected to perform in their society’ (see also Lawson, 1994). However, the most notable contribution to this ‘comparative-historical’ research agenda is, arguably, Richard Katz and Peter Mair’s (1994) frequently cited anthology, How Parties Organize.

The most groundbreaking decision made by Katz and Mair (1992), during the data collection for the anthology, was to focus solely on what they called ‘the official story’, meaning that contributors to the project would have to rely exclusively on authorized material produced by the parties themselves. Hence, instead of approaching parties through a selection of both formal and informal data, the contributors would only consider official rules and statutes as well as ‘other party reports and documents’ (Katz and Mair, 1992: 7). The rationale behind this decision was that official data tends to reflect the current balance of power within party organizations, and that changes in this balance will eventually manifest in rules and regulations. Although acknowledging that the official story is not necessarily the real story, Katz and Mair thus refute Ostrogorski’s (1902), Michels’ (1915), Duverger’s (1954) and Panebianco’s (1988) warnings about not relying too heavily on authorized material as being ‘fundamentally wrong in its emphasis’. The official story, they contend, provides a useful starting point for understanding the organization of political parties and offers an ‘incomparable source of reasonably hard data that can be used in the analysis of party organization across both time and space’ (Katz and Mair, 1992: 8).

The methodological principles spelled out in the work of Katz and Mair has had unparalleled impact on contemporary party organization literature. In fact, most studies of party organization today rely almost exclusively on ‘the official story’, albeit often without referring to their approach as such. One recent example is Susan Scarrow and colleagues’ (2017) anthology, Organizing Political Parties, in which a number of high-profile authors set out to update debates about structures, resources and representative strategies in present-day parties. In this case, the editors of the volume explicitly embrace the official story approach, noting that ‘this choice was made in full knowing that formal structures do not tell the complete story about actual power relations’, and that ‘the alternative would have been to collect expert judgements concerning these issues’ (Scarrow and Webb, 2017: 13).

Such statements capture the spirit of the comparative perspective. First, they illustrate the departure from the methodological principles guiding the first two waves of literature. Participant observation, personal communication and other qualitative strategies for collecting data that were crucial to Michels and Duverger are not even considered options in more recent studies. Second, it shows how the analytical strategy has shifted from inductive reasoning and theory building to deductive reasoning and formal comparisons across time and space (see also Gauja and Kosiara-Pedersen, 2021). In that sense, the comparative perspective combines the classical perspective’s interest in the orchestration of parties with the configurational perspective’s focus on systematism and comparability, but completely abandons the ambition of understanding ‘the inner life of the party’ by almost exclusively analysing party-sanctioned material (Barrling, 2013). Fortunately, there is an emerging literature within organization studies that extends the (also limited) work of political anthropologists working with parties from a qualitative, in-depth perspective.

Fourth wave: the cultural perspective

The fourth wave of party organizations literature is perhaps less of an actual wave and more of a slow tide rolling in. Some of the earliest contributions to what I call the cultural perspective appeared in the 1990s, where political anthropologists such as Myron Aronoff (1993) and David Kertzer (1996) published ethnographic accounts of life inside political parties. Aronoff’s study was actually first published in the late 1970s but was initially met with dismissive reviews that failed to appreciate the depth and freshness of his analysis of ‘power and ritual’ in the Israeli Labor Party. The second edition of the book was more successful, but Aronoff (1993: 3) still had to work hard to explain and justify what he rightfully called ‘an unconventional approach’ to the study of parties. What made Aronoff’s study stand out from the majority of research on party organization was not only his focus on the symbolic aspects of party organization, such as the way in which rituals are used to promote particular understandings of the party and suppress others, but also his firm reliance on ethnographic observations. As he notes in the preface to the second edition (Aronoff, 1993: xiii), published one year after Katz and Mair launched their ‘official story’ approach:

To the best of my knowledge, this is not only the first, but remains the only anthropological study of a major national political party. The use of extensive participant observation from the grass-roots branches to the most sensitive and closed inner forums of the national party institutions was without precedent, and regrettably has not (to the best of my knowledge) been emulated. The symbolic analysis of the manipulation of issues and the ritualization of politics in a modern socialist political party was innovative at the time [in 1977] and remains more unconventional that I would have anticipated or hoped it would be a decade and a half after the original publication.

In many ways, Kertzer’s (1996) analysis of the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI) transition to the post-communist era can be seen as the successor to Aronoff’s work because it shares a focus on symbolism and builds on participant observations. Kertzer’s main point is that symbols such as the hammer and sickle, verbal signifiers such as the word ‘comrade’ and rituals such as the singing of the ‘Internationale’ played a central role in the struggle between PCI’s reformist majority and its traditionalist minority, and that the leadership successfully facilitated the party’s process of becoming the Democratic Party of the Left by using these symbols, signifiers and rituals strategically. This approach to cultural analysis is later picked up by contemporary political anthropologists such as Florence Faucher-King (2005), in her remarkable study of party conferences across four British parties, and Emma Crewe (2015), in her equally impressive study of the UK House of commons. Both studies use anthropological methods to get below or beyond the well-polished surface layer and explore what actually keeps the party machine running. Only in doing so are they able to show that the ‘official’ story rarely corresponds to the real story, and that actual power relations do not always materialize in rules and regulations.

In the past few years, a handful of organization scholars have taken inspiration from this approach and helped popularize the idea the political parties can tell us something interesting about organizational culture in general. Examples include, but are not limited to, Leopold Ringel’s (2019) study of the ‘transparency-secrecy nexus’ in the German Pirate Party (see also Reischauer and Ringel, 2023), Paresha Sinha and colleagues’ (2021) account of Jeremy Corbyn’s dramaturgical leadership practices in the British Labour Party (see also Smolović Jones et al, 2021), and some of my own work on Alternativet in Denmark and a local party in south-west England called Independents for Frome (for example Husted, 2020 and 2021).

However, unlike the three other perspectives, the cultural perspective lacks a consistent analytical strategy. This may have something to do with so few party researchers hitherto engaging with anthropological issues and methods, but it may also be caused by the somewhat slippery character of the concept of ‘culture’. What are we actually talking about when we talk about culture, and where do we look for it? To remedy this shortcoming, I use Chapter 8 in this book to suggest an analytical strategy for the study of party cultures that build on the work of Joanne Martin (1992) in particular. Without going into detail, Martin outlines three approaches to organizational culture that seem oppositional at first sight, but which can actually be combined into what Sara Louise Muhr and colleagues (2022) call a ‘multi-dimensional’ framework for analysis.

When combining these three approaches, we are able to paint a comprehensive and holistic picture of organizational cultures that helps us see that some things unite all members of a party, while other things cause opposition and conflict, and that a number of additional things produce ambiguity and serve as a source of disintegration. This way of thinking about culture in political parties represents one way of moving the literature on party organization forward, since it helps us analyse phenomena that are otherwise overlooked by the other perspectives because they simply ‘cannot be measured’ (Eriksen, 2021: 21). However, to fully appreciate the value of the cultural perspective as well as the other three perspectives, we need to apply them and gauge the results. This is why one half of this book is dedicated to a detailed description of perspectives, while the other half is dedicated to their application. This leads us to the case at the centre of this book, namely the Danish green party called Alternativet.

Alternativet

This book is, as mentioned, partly about four theoretical perspectives on party organization and partly about a political party in Denmark that calls itself Alternativet (‘The Alternative’, in English). The book is structured so that one chapter outlines one of the theoretical perspectives, and then the following chapter applies it to the case of Alternativet. Chapter 2 unfolds the classical perspective, and Chapter 3 applies it to Alternativet; Chapter 4 describes the configurational perspective, and Chapter 5 applies it to Alternativet; and so on. In Chapters 3 and 5, I unfold the origin story of the party and analyse its organizational development. I will therefore not say much about that here, but some basic facts are useful to understand what kind of party Alternativet is, and why it makes sense to use it as a case for this particular book.

Alternativet was launched in late 2013 as a response to a number of perceived crises in contemporary society, such as the financial crisis, the climate crisis and what the party described as a ‘crisis of trust’ and a ‘crisis of empathy’. It was officially founded by the former minister of culture in Denmark, Uffe Elbæk, and a union leader called Josephine Fock, but many less well-known activists worked hard to realize the project in practice. One thing that made Alternativet stand out from other parties was that it initially had no (or, at least very little) political direction. There was no political programme, no key campaign issues and no commitment to a particular ideological position. Instead, the idea was to involve members in a bottom-up process of policy making. Hence, all Alternativet initially had was a one-page manifesto, six lofty values (empathy, humility, generosity, transparency, humour, courage) and a handful of debate principles that were meant to guide the deliberative part of the policy-making process.

In early 2014, Alternativet organized a number of political laboratories, which are perhaps best described as themed workshops where members and non-members could debate particular policy issues (such as taxation, education or health). These laboratories served as the foundation for the policy-making process, and, a few months later, Alternativet could present its first political programme: a 64-page document bursting with radical proposals for how to make Danish society alternative. Many proposals concerned environmentalism and climate-change mitigation; others addressed problems related to mental health, education, culture, entrepreneurship and democratization more broadly.

A year later, Alternativet was elected to the Danish parliament with 4.8 per cent of the votes, which translated into nine parliamentary seats. The success story continued for a couple of years, but, in 2017, things turned sour. Internal conflicts arose, rumours of top-down management proliferated, and rival parties started to ‘steal’ Alternativet’s thunder by branding themselves as greener or more democratic. This threw the party into a self-perpetuating downward spiral, which culminated in 2020 when surveys showed around 0.3 per cent public support for Alternativet. On top of that, more than 90 per cent of the party’s members resigned their subscription in frustration, and four out of five MPs (including Elbæk) left Alternativet for a new rival party called Independent Greens, leaving just one MP, Torsten Gejl, to fight for the party’s parliamentary survival. Prior to the elections in 2022, Alternativet surprisingly managed to regain some of its strength by forging alliances with a couple of minor parties and by electing a new leader, Franciska Rosenkilde, who genuinely seemed committed to restoring Alternativet’s political and organizational legitimacy. At the time of writing (November 2023), the party is polling at around 3 per cent nationally and has six seats in parliament.

Throughout this book, I will describe Alternativet as a European green party, but it would perhaps be more accurate to categorize it as a Nordic green party. What characterizes green parties in general is that they typically originate outside parliament and emerge as a response to perceived environmental and democratic crises (van Haute, 2016). This kind of emergence has consequences for their ideological dispositions, which typically reflect a strong commitment to issues such as sustainability, ecology and veganism, and for their organizational setup. In fact, green parties are often described as the most internally democratic party family overall (Bolin et al, 2017). However, green parties are generally reluctant to be pigeonholed on a traditional left/right scale, preferring instead to identify with a third position outside ‘old’ politics, which is sometimes framed as non-ideological and driven purely by natural necessity (Stavrakakis, 1997). This final point is particularly true for the Nordic green parties, most of which see themselves as neither left nor right, nor centre (van Haute, 2016). All of these characteristics apply to Alternativet. The party emerged as a reaction to a number of perceived crises, it is heavily committed to green policy issues, it has (or had) an extremely democratic organizational set-up and it actively refuses to be associated with either the left (and the colour red) or the right (and the colour blue), preferring instead to be classified as the only true member of the ‘green block’ in Danish politics.

I have personally studied Alternativet and written extensively about its rise and fall in journal articles and book chapters (for example, Husted and Plesner, 2017; Husted, 2018; Husted, 2020; Husted and Just, 2022; Husted and Mac, 2022). Some of the following chapters draw on these publications, and this is one reason why the book centres on Alternativet. The more substantial reason is that Alternativet holds the potential to bridge the gap between political science and organization studies because of its unconventional nature both politically and organizationally. Alternativet has proved to be one of the most innovative political parties in Danish politics for decades, and it has rewritten the rules of the game in many respects. Hence, Alternativet is a curious phenomenon for people interested in electoral politics and for those interested in organizational dynamics and institutional entrepreneurship more broadly. As already mentioned, I view political parties as ‘critical cases’ of organizing in general (Husted et al, 2022), but I see Alternativet as a particularly interesting case of alternative organizing because it has so evidently challenged the dominant order and the established modes of governance in its field (see Dahlman et al, 2022).

In short, Alternativet allows us to see things that we might not otherwise be able to see in other organizations, let alone in other political parties, and the following chapters will hopefully make that clear. I am forever thankful for the unconditional level of access that I was granted by members of Alternativet from 2014 to 2017, and I am impressed by the fact that I have been invited to give talks and host seminars within the party, despite some of my more critical conclusions. In that respect, the party certainly meets its own standards of transparency and generosity. Rarely have I met such open and accommodating people. I can only hope that they too can see the value in what I have been doing for the past decade. A special thanks to those members and ex-members of Alternativet who took the time to discuss and/or read parts of the book. Here, I would like to mention Nilas Bay-Foged, Mark Desholm, and Nils Brøgger. You might not know it, but your help has been invaluable and a great source of encouragement all along.