PARTIES IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT: A REVIEW

Abstract

‘Party decline’ and ‘crisis’ have been a long-standing observation of the state of party politics explaining: how parties have lost touch with their electorates, the concentration of power in a small elite disconnected from rank-and-file members and poor internal party democracy. In a local setting we can expect those indicators of decline to be magnified and in this article, we suggest some lessons which may be learned, for the concept of ‘party decline’, by examining parties in local government. Across Europe, in local government, power has been concentrated in party groups with strong party discipline and important decisions are taken behind closed doors. We maintain that our review, exploring the similar patterns found from research in England and the Nordic countries, generates general insights about the state of parties today, making it reasonable to hypothesise that a general pattern of local party decline across Europe is emerging, and that this has far-reaching consequences for the functioning of local democracy.

Notes

The interesting work on 'the everyday maker' was developed in the Danish setting (Bang and Sørensen 1999), a concept referring to citizens becoming alienated from the political system and participating on their own terms (see also Li and Marsh 2008).