National party structure in parliamentary federations: subcontracting electoral mobilisation in Canada and Australia

Abstract

National parties in the Canadian and Australian parliamentary federations, despite the differences in their federal systems, are dependent for their success in mobilising electoral support on a similar network of local and subnational partisan activity over which they have, at best, only limited control. We find that, over the last 100 years, national parties in both federations have moved through a similar sequence of structural changes, none of which has altered their reliance on subnational agencies for mobilising local support. We argue that these regularities flow from the nature of parliamentary government in these two federations, their origins as federations by aggregation, and the use of single member districts for electing the lower house of their national legislatures.