Co-leading the party: co-leadership, institutionalisation, and party organisation in two Swedish parties

Abstract This article examines how co-leadership is organised in political parties and how its form depends on institutionalisation, party organisation, and relational conditions. Drawing on 12 elite interviews and party statutes in two Swedish parties, the Green Party and the Left Party, it analyses three leadership constellations and distinguishes between joint, invited, and functionally differentiated forms of co-leadership. The findings show that co-leadership is not a single institutional model. In the Green Party, it was formally embedded in dual spokesperson-ship but enacted differently across two dyads. In the Left Party, it emerged informally within a formally singular leadership structure. Across the cases, respondents emphasised trust, limited prestige-seeking, dense dialogue, a shared political project, symbolic equality, and common organisational support. The article also suggests that more joint forms of co-leadership may become harder to sustain when leaders are no longer embedded in the same organisational setting. More broadly, it argues that party leadership should be analysed not only as an individual attribute but as an organisational arrangement shaped by party rules, party-family traditions, and institutional location.