Political Parties In Multi-level Polities

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Political parties are essential for parliamentary democracy, the form of government that prevails in most European states. But how have parties adapted to modern society - not least a new layer of political decision-making in the EU? Should we talk of a crisis of party democracy? This book reports the findings of a comparative survey of parties in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland and Sweden, all EU member states; and Norway, which remains outside the Union.

Using original data, it explores how power is exercised within party organisations and their respective parliamentary groups. Within an analytical framework that envisages a party as a series of delegation relationships, the book illuminates how leaders are chosen, how election candidates are selected, how manifestos are written - and how a party's various elements are co-ordinated.

For all the challenges posed by multi-level governance, parties retain much of their capacity for making democracy work. Review: Comparing how intra-party delegation and accountability mechanisms work in the Nordic countries, Aylott, Blomgren and Bergman provide plenty of evidence about both change and continuity inside political parties.

Based on extensive empirical material and sophisticated argumentation, this book is essential reading to students of political parties, Europeanisation and the state of representative democracy in today's multi-level European polity. Tapio Raunio, School of Management, University of Tampere, Finland Political Parties in Multi-Level Polities' fills an important gap in the literature by investigating the effect of European integration on the mechanisms of democratic accountability within political parties.

The contribution to the literature is both theoretical and empirical: it presents a clear and original principal-agent framework focusing on delegation within party organizations, and it presents systematic and rich case studies studying how intra-party delegation occurs in the Nordic political parties.

The book is essential reading for party researchers as well as for scholars of European integration and should have important implications for future research in the field. Hanna Back, Department of Political Science, Lund University This timely book provides a valuable theoretical and empirical examination of intra-party organization and democracy, across the national and European level of government, within the Nordic region.

It will be welcomed by those particularly concerned with Nordic politics, but also be of interest to students of party organizations and European integration in general. Elin Haugsgjerd Allern, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo