PhD Catch-All Parties
 
 

Populism in Europe
 

Partisan States
 

Institutional Conflict
 

Politiek in Nederland


Partisan States

On face value, legal regulation of political parties seems anti-democratic: a state regulating and thereby limiting and controlling the scope of activities of political parties could indicate a non-democratic regime. Nevertheless, as the Weimar Republic has shown, the survival and substance of democracy depends to a large extent on the well-functioning and democratic behaviour of political parties and their representatives. In this sense, legal provisions can also provide politicians with some sort of protection against arbitrary state intervention and prosecution. Many countries, for example, give some form of immunity against prosecution to party representatives in parliament. Additionally, parliamentary representatives at national, regional and local level usually have a special constitutionally assigned status or particular legal rights and obligations that sets them apart from ordinary citizens. Furthermore, democratic states have adopted constitutional provisions and electoral laws in order to regulate the transfer of ‘the will of the people’ as expressed during elections into a representative parliamentary body. These regulations usually stipulate the main procedural rules for entering political competition, the processing of the votes and their ‘translation’ into seats. Additionally, these regulations often spell out the rules for the formation of bodies of electoral control and administration. Also, democracies have to regulate the smooth transfer of power between competing political forces when the electoral results require or indicate an alternation of government. Finally, most states regulate what candidates for public office can or can not do, regulating their campaigning activity, their accumulation of resources and their access and use of state resources. It is the sum of these legal provisions and limitations regulating political parties that resulted in a process of state-party collusion, meaning that the organisation of political parties and state institutions become increasingly interconnected and amalgamated.

In this project I analyse this changing relationship between political parties and the state, focusing on the legal regulation of parties. First I discuss the development of party democracy in the four countries of this study: France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Secondly I study the extent to which states have formally recognised the existence of parties by analysing legislation on political parties in the various national constitutions and laws. Thirdly I examine the level to which the state supports and facilitates the functioning of political parties by assessing the (financial) resources parties extract from the state. Finally, I evaluate the interaction between parties and the state by analysing the legal regulation of inner-party proceedings and the internal organisation of political parties, particularly emphasising candidate selection. Candidate selection is a crucial interface between parties and the state as through inner-party selection processes, party elites become power-holders in the legislative and executive branch of the state.