The Local Roots of the Nationalization of Politics

Over the course of the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, established Western democracies experienced a profound nationalization of their political processes. What was once a fragmented and parochial type of politics, varying extensively across the territory and dominated by local elites, was slowly replaced by a system of national representation.

This talk develops a new framework for explaining how national party systems become locally rooted. The starting point is a multilevel polity in which national party brands exist, but their territorial reach depends on the choices of local political entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs face a strategic tradeoff: they can pursue locally oriented and personalistic strategies, or affiliate with national parties. Affiliation can pay off because it helps entrepreneurs win local office and, once local branches and elites exist, it strengthens the party’s national electoral performance in the same places. The framework also implies a reinforcing mechanism: governing parties at the national level can use distributive policy to reward aligned localities, thereby increasing the expected returns to adopting the national brand and accelerating local nationalization.

These mechanisms are illustrated with two empirical studies. The first uses institutional variation in French municipal electoral rules around a population threshold to identify how incentives for party-branded local competition shape subsequent national election performance. The second uses original archival data from pre–World War II Sweden to examine whether discretionary intergovernmental transfers rewarded municipalities where governing parties, especially a junior coalition partner with weaker local penetration, gained local seats. Together, the papers link organizational entry, electoral incentives, and fiscal rewards into a unified account of party system nationalization from the ground up.

The project has implications for how we understand the historical nationalization of party systems in established democracies. At the same time, it helps shed light on more recent developments in which cracks have emerged in this process, as voting patterns have become increasingly geographically polarized, challenging the long-term trend toward nationalized politics.