Removing the intermediaries? : patterns of intra-party organizational change in Europe (1970–2010)

Abstract

The aim of this article is to place the recent debate on the concept of disintermediation—intended as the process of change in political representation towards more direct forms of political mediation—within the broader literature on party change, to assess its actual usefulness in the field. We maintain that the potential of this concept applied to party organization is mainly heuristic, as it describes a number of intertwined changes observable in parties’ resources, representative strategies and structures. Our expectation is that contemporary parties have progressively adopted disintermediated organizational profiles, by weakening the intermediate organs while favouring both the parliamentarization of the leadership and the opening of their membership. These assumptions are empirically verified through a diachronic analysis of the party changes registered in nine European democracies, from the beginning of the 1970s to 2010. All in all, we argue that parties’ internal disintermediation has increased in most countries, in the passing from the 1990s to the New Millennium.