Local party organizations in Denmark: crisis or adaption?

Editors’ note: Several factors in this chapter illustrate the workings of the theoretical framework. First, Jensen observes a political pattern similar to that in Switzerland and Germany, where parties strive for compromise and look for policies supported by all political groupings in the community. As expected, this is especially true in smaller communities, where inhabitants tend to suppress political conflict or believe that community problems are nonpolitical and are to be solved by professional expertise according to the criterion of “technical efficiency.” The traditional political culture of small towns initially made it difficult for national parties to colonize the countryside because these communities stressed values of personalized trust and community reputation (see also Schneider, Chapter 5). As in Great Britain and Germany, the spread of local parties and contested partisan elections since the 1970s was preconditioned by territorial reforms that resulted in diminishing the numbers and raising the average size of communities all over the country. Although municipal reorganization, proportional representation, and public financing have strengthened local branches of national parties, other events such as the movement to unranked party lists and the decentralization of formal authority to administrative units have weakened them.

243Second, this chapter shows the structural and behavioral inertia of local parties, which limits their ability to exploit their natural advantage. Given the spatial proximity of their supporters, we would expect that local sections are prone to informal, personalized activities like door-to-door canvassing, whereas supralocal parties would focus more on indirect contacts such as direct mail or through various media. But empirically, such expectations are not fully borne out; informal contacts are found to be rare, and mediated forms of communication are used almost to the same degree as supralocal party levels. Jensen shows that communal parties “cling to the old ways” even in the face of shrinking memberships (see also Ladner, Chapter 9, and Scarrow, Chapter 6). At the same time, local political parties have again “inherited” many former activists set free by the decline of their respective (e.g., antinuclear or pacifist) movements. Thus, Jensen concludes that local parties have again gained momentum and reached the same level of activity in the 1990s that they had twenty years earlier. Finally, Jensen argues that local parties tend to occupy an important budgetary role in local policymaking because they are often the only groupings aiming to reduce public expenses, whereas all other groups (voluntary associations, and so on) try to increase public spending in some specific area (see also Magnier, Chapter 8).