The geography of the party on the ground: Local branches in Italy and Sweden in the late twentieth century

The idea that the presence of Western European political parties at grassroots level rose and fell in the twentieth century is central to some of the most influential theories of party organization. However, due to a mixture of patchy national-level data that has been provided by the parties themselves, and a focus by scholars on members rather than branches, we know little about the geography of party structures on the ground. In this article, we address these issues by using an unobtrusive method – consulting historical phonebooks – to determine exactly where parties invested in local branches in Italy and Sweden in the second half of the twentieth century. We theorize that the extent to which parties were present uniformly across a national territory depended on the degree to which politics was nationalized in that country. Using spatial lag regressions, we find strong support for our argument: in the less nationalized case of Italy, parties’ investments in local branches followed two major geographically-based cleavages – center vs periphery, and urban vs rural – while in the more nationalized Sweden, they were relatively uniform across different types of geographical areas. Overall, our findings illustrate how the extent to which you saw the rise and fall of the party on the ground in the second half of the twentieth century depended on where you were. Our research thus shines new light on the history of the party on the ground, in addition to underscoring the value of “bringing territory in” to the study of party organization.