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Introduction
In the last three decades, a number of Western European countries have adopted
decentralizing institutional reforms, devolving political and administrative power to
subcentral units (Jeffery 1997, Keating 1998). Often such reforms involve the creation of
an additional level of electoral politics in which parties must compete for control over the
new institutions. Along with the process of European integration, these decentralizing
reforms imply that political parties must increasingly be analyzed in terms of multi-level
electoral politics. However, few attempts have been made to assess the relationship
between political decentralization and party organizational transformation, or the
dilemmas faced by political parties which must compete for power at multiple levels
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This paper seeks to enhance our understanding of the ways in which
decentralizing reforms influence and shape how parties organize at both the statewide and
non-statewide level. In particular, it focuses on statewide parties which have to compete
across the national territory, adapting their strategies and messages to different territorial
realities in the context of multi-level electoral politics. We hypothesize possible party
reactions and adaptations to these circumstances, looking at changes in candidate
selection, competitive strategies and governing strategies (Hopkin 2003). We then go on
to assess the emerging reality of party organization in multi-level conditions in two
prominent Western European cases: Spain, where an extensive quasi-federal arrangement
has developed over the past two decades, and the United Kingdom, where devolution to
some of the component nations has been adopted more recently. This comparative
analysis shows how multi-level electoral politics creates new organizational and political
Convention