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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. |