THE DIFFUSION OF PARTY ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURES FROM "OLD EUROPE" TO "NEW": A HYPOTHESIS

NICHOLAS AYLOTTSdertrn 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 Comments and criticisms are exceedingly welcome, but please do not quote without permission.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

2

(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

3

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

4

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

5

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

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

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

Lithuania 2004-2007 + 0.61 2.66

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

REFERENCES

Allern, Elin Haugsgjerd (2007), Parties, Interest Groups and Democracy: Political Parties and their Relationship with Interest Groups in Norway (Oslo: Unipub).

Allern, Elin Haugsgjerd, Nicholas Aylott and Flemming Juul Christiansen (2008), "Scener fra et ktenskab: Socialdemokratiske partier og fagforeninger i Skandinavien", in Karina Kosiara-Pedersen and Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard (eds), Partier og partisystemer i forandring: Festskrift til Lars Bille (Odense: Syddansk universitetsforlag).

Biezen, Ingrid van (2000), "On the Internal Balance of Party Power: Party Organization in New Democracies", Party Politics 6:4, 395-417.

Biezen, Ingrid van (2003), Political Parties in New Democracies: Party Organization in Southern and East-Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave).

Biezen, Ingrid van (2004), "Political Parties as Public Utilities", Party Politics 10:6, 701-22.

Biezen, Ingrid van (2005), "On the Theory and Practice of Party Formation and Adaptation in New Democracies", European Journal of Political Research 44, 147-74.

Biezen, Ingrid van and Petr Kopecky (2003), "On the Predominance of State Money: Reasessing Party Financing in the New Democracies of Southern and Eastern Europe", in Paul Lewis and Paul Webb (eds), Pan-European Perspectives on Party Politics (Leiden: Brill).

Bennett, Colin J. (1991), "What is Policy Convergence and What Causes It?", British Journal of Political Science 21: 215-233.

Bille, Lars (2001), "Democratizing a Democratic Procedure: Myth or Reality? Candidate Selection in Western European Parties, 1960-1990", Party Politics 7:3, 363-380.

Braun, Dietmar and Fabrizio Gilardi (2006), "Taking 'Galton's Problem' Seriously: Towards a Theory of Policy Diffusion", Journal of Theoretical Politics 18:3, 298-322.

Brinks, Daniel and Michael Coppedge (2006), "Diffusion is No Illusion: Neighbor Emulation in the Third Wave of Democracy", Comparative Political Studies 39:4, 463-89.

Collier, David and Richard E. Messick (1975), "Prerequisites versus Diffusion: Testing Alternative Explanations of Social Security Adoption", American Political Science Review 69, 1299-1315.

Crum, Ben and John E. Fossum (2009), 'The Multilevel Parliamentary Field: A Framework for Theorizing Representative Democracy in the EU', European Political Science Review 1:2, 249-71.

DiMaggio, Paul J. and Walter W. Powell (1983), "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields", American Sociological Review 48:2, 147-160.

Duverger, Maurice (1954), Political Parties (London: Methuen).

19

Enyedi, Zsolt (1996), "Organizing a Subcultural Party in Eastern Europe: The Case of the Hungarian Christian Democrats", Party Politics 2:3, 377-96.

Enyedi, Zsolt (2006), "Party Politics in Post-Communist Transition", in William Crotty and Richard Katz (eds), Handbook of Political Parties (London: Sage).

Enyedi, Zsolt and Lukas Linek (2006), "Searching for the Right Organization: Ideology and Party Structure in East/Central Europe", Party Politics 14:4, 455-77.

Enyedi, Zsolt and Gabor Toka (2006), "The Only Game in Town: Party Politics in Hungary", in Paul Webb and Stephen White (eds), Party Politics in New Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Geddes, Barbara (1995), "A Comparative Perspective on the Leninist Legacy in Eastern Europe", Comparative Political Studies 28:2, 239-74.

Gerring, John (2007), Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Gleditsch, Kristian Skrede and Michael D. Ward (2006), "Diffusion and the International Context of Democratization", International Organization 60, 911-33.

Grofman, Bernard, Evald Mikkel and Rein Taagepera (2000), "Fission and Fusion of Parties in Estonia, 1987-1999", Journal of Baltic Studies 31:4, 329-57.

Haas, Peter M. (1992), "Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination", International Organization 46:1, 1-35.

Hanley, San (2001), "Are the Exceptions Really the Rule? Questioning the Application of 'Electoral-Professional' Type Models of Party Organisation in East Central Europe", Perspectives on European Politics and Society 2:3, 543-579.

Heidar, Knut and Jo Saglie (2002), Hva skjer med partierne? (Oslo: Gylendal).

Hirschman, Albert O. (1970), Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Hopkin, Jonathan and Caterina Paolucci (1999), "The Business Firm Model of Party Organisation: Cases from Italy and Spain", European Journal of Poltiical Research 35, 307-39.

Houten, Peter van (2009), "Multi-Level Relations in Political Parties: A Delegation Approach", Party Politics 15:2, 137-56.

Hough, Dan, William E. Paterson and James Sloan (eds), Learning from the West? Policy Transfer and Programmatic Change in the Communist Successor Parties of Central and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge).

20

Jacobsson, Bengt (2009a, forthcoming), "Scripted States and Changes to Governance", in Bengt Jacobsson (eds), The EU and the Baltic States: Changing Forms of Governance (London: Routledge).

Jacobsson, Bengt (2009b, forthcoming), "Europeanization and Organization Theory", in Bengt Jacobsson (eds), The EU and the Baltic States: Changing Forms of Governance (London: Routledge).

Jahn, Detlef (2006), "Globalization as 'Galton's Prolem': The Missing Link in the Analysis of Diffusion Patterns in Welfare State Development", International Organization 60, 401-31.

Johansson, Karl Magnus (2007), "International Influences on Political Parties: Baltic Case Studies", paper presented at the international conference of the European Union Studies Association, Montreal, May 17th-19th.

Johansson, Karl Magnus (2008), "External Legitimization and Standardization of National Political Parties: The Case of Estonian Social Democracy", Journal of Baltic Studies 39:2, 157-83.

Johansson, Karl Magnus (2009), 'The Emergence of Political Parties at European Level: Integration Unaccomplished', in Sverker Gustavsson, Lars Oxelheim and Lars Pehrson (eds), How Unified is the European Union? European Integration Between Visions and Popular Legitimacy (Berlin: Springer).

Katz, Richard S. (2002), "The Internal Life of Parties", in Kurt Richard Luther and Ferdinand Mller-Rommel (eds), Political Parties in the New Europe: Political and Analytical Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Katz, Richard S. and Peter Mair (1992), "Introduction: The Cross-National Study of Party Organizations", in Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair (eds), Party Organization: A Data Handbook (London: Sage).

Katz, Richard S. and Peter Mair (1995), "Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party", Party Politics 1:1, 5-28.

Katz, Richard S. and Peter Mair (2002), "The Ascendancy of the Party in Public Office: Party Organizational Change in 20th-Century Democracies", in Richard Gunther, Jos Rmon Montero and Juan L. Linz (eds), Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Kern, Kristine, Claudia Koll and Malte Schophaus (2007), 'The Diffusion of Local Agenda 21 in Germany: Comparing the German Federal States', Environmental Politics 16:4, 604-624.

Kitschelt, Herbert P., Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslav Markowski and Gabor Toka (1999), Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Kopecky, Petr (1995), "Developing Party Organizations in East-Central Europe: What Type of Party is Likely to Emerge?", Party Politics 1, 515-34.

Kopecky, Petr (2006a), "The Rise of the Power Monopoly: Political Parties in the Czech Republic", in

21

Susanne Jungerstam-Mulders (ed.), Post-Comunist EU Member States: Parties and Party Systems (Aldershot: Ashgate).

Kopecky, Petr (2006b), "Political Parties and the State in Post-Communist Europe: the Nature of Symbiosis", Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 27:3, 251-73.

Kopecky, Petr (2007), "Building Party Government: Political Parties in the Czech and Slovak Republics", in Paul Webb and Stephen White (eds), Party Politics in New Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Kopstein, Jeffrey S. and David A. Reilly (2000), "Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World", World Politics 53, 1-37.

Krouwel, Andr (2006), "Party Models", in Richard S. Katz and William Crotty (eds), Handbook of Party Politics (London: Sage).

Krupavicius, Algis (1998), "The Postcomunist Transition and Institutionalization of Lithuania's Parties", Political Studies 46:3, 465-91.

Ladrech, Robert (ed.) (2002), The Europeanization of Party Politics, special issue, Party Politics 8:4.

Lagerspetz, Mikko (2003), "How Many Nordic Countries? Possibilities and Limits of Geopolitical Identity Construction", Cooperation and Conflict 38:1, 49-61.

Lane, Jan-Erik and Svante Ersson (1997), "Parties and Voters: What Creates the Ties?", Scandinavian Political Studies 20:2, 179-96.

Lijphart, Arend (1971), "Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method", American Political Science Review 65:3, 682-693.

Lindberg, Bjrn, Anne Rasmussen and Andreas Warntjen (2008), "Party Politics as Usual? The Role of Political Parties in EU Legislative Decision-Making", Journal of European Public Policy 15:8, 1107-26.

Lupia, Arthur (2003), "Delegation and its Perils", in Kaare Strm, Wolfgang C. Muller and Torbjrn Bergman (eds) (2003), Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Mair, Peter (1997), Party System Change: Approaches and Interpretations (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Mller, Wolfgang C. (2000), "Political Parties in Parliamentary Democracies: Making Delegation and Accountability Work", European Journal of Political Research 37, 309-33.

Narud, Hanne Marthe, Mogens N. Pedersen and Henry Valen (2002), Party Sovereignty and Citizen Control: Selecting Candidates for Parliamentary Elections in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark).

22

Olson, David M. (1998), "Party Formation and Party System Consolidation in the New Democracies of Central Europe", Political Studies 46:3, 432-64.

Pabriks, Artis and Aiga Stokenberga (2006), "Political Parties and the Party System in Latvia", in Susanne Jungerstam-Mulders (ed.), Post-Comunist EU Member States: Parties and Party Systems (Aldershot: Ashgate).

Panebianco, Angelo (1988), Political Parties: Organization and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Petersson, Olof, Gudmund Hernes, Sren Holmberg, Lise Togeby and Lena Wngnerud (2000), Demokrati utan partier? (Stockholm: SNS Frlag).

Perkins, Doug (1996), "Structure and Choice: The Role of Organizations, Patronage and the Media in Party Formation", Party Politics 2:3, 355-75.

Pettai, Vello and Marcus Kreuzer (1998), "Party Politics in the Baltic States: Social Bases and Institutional Context", East European Politics & Societies 13, 148-89.

Poguntke, Thomas (2002), "Party Organisational Linkage: Parties Without Firm Social Roots?", in Kurt Richard Luther and Ferdinand Mller-Rommel (eds), Political Parties in the New Europe: Political and Analytical Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Poguntke, Thomas, Nicholas Aylott, Elisabeth Carter, Robert Ladrech and Kurt Richard Luther (eds) (2007), The Europeanization of National Political Parties: Power and Organizational Adaptation (London: Routledge).

Radaelli, Claudio M. (2000a), "Policy Transfer in the European Union: Institutional Isomorphism as a Source of Legitimacy", Governance 13, 25-43.

Radaelli, Claudio M. (2000b), "Whither Europeaization? Concept Stretching and Substantive Change", European Integration online Papers 4:8.

Rybar, Marek (2006), "Old Parties and New: Changing Patterns of Party Politics in Slovakia", in Susanne Jungerstam-Mulders (ed.), Post-Comunist EU Member States: Parties and Party Systems (Aldershot: Ashgate).

Shipan, Charles R. and Craig Volden (2008), "The Mechanisms of Policy Diffusion", American Journal of Political Science 52:4, 840-87.

Sikk, Allan (2006), "From Private Organizations to Democratic Infrastructure: Political Parties and the State in Estonia", Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 22:3, 341-61.

Simon, Herbert A. (1985), "Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science", American Political Science Review 79:2, 293-304.

Simmons, Beth, Frank Dobbin and Geoffrey Garrett (2006), "Introduction: The International Diffusion

23

of Liberalism", International Organization 60, 781-810.

Strang, David and John W. Meyer (1993), "Institutional Conditions for Diffusion", Theory and Society 22, 487-511.

Sundberg, Jan (2002), "The Scandinavian Party Model at the Crossroads", in Paul Webb, David Farrell and Ian Holliday (eds) (2002), Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Sundberg, Jan (2003), Parties as Organised Actors: The Transformation of the Scandinavian Three-Front Parties (Helsinki: Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters).

24

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