Over the last two decades, New Left and libertarian parties in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and France have made electoral inroads.' Most recently, parties under the green, ecological, or label have won significant electoral support in Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, and West Germany. Both types of belong to a new cohort of left-libertarian parties. They share the traditional Left's concern for egalitarianism and political control of the economy, but they question centralized planning, a policy process dominated by small political elites, and the desirability of increased material affluence. Instead, they emphasize participatory democracy, political decentralization, and quality of life issues, such as environmental protection and more personalized social services. All left-libertarian parties share the same core constituencies: younger, educated, urban, secular members of the new middle classes who work overproportionally in the public service sector.2 Left-libertarian parties have gained their greatest support in affluent countries with large welfare states, significant socialist or social democratic government participation, and corporatist systems of interest intermediation. A feature of the latter is centralized unions which often participate in peak level economic policymaking.3 On the one hand, the relative security of large groups of the population from contingencies of the business cycle in market economies has given noneconomic issues greater potential salience. On the other hand, the centralized, bureaucratic organization of the left parties and labor unions in these countries has made it difficult for these new issues to be represented in existing political channels of interest articulation and participation. Hence proponents of the left-libertarian policy agenda have created alternative organizational vehicles, such as new social movements focused on the environment, dangers of technology, status of women, and social self-help groups and left-libertarian parties. Left-libertarian parties see the established parties as centralist, elitist, and bureaucratic organizations which have ceased to be instruments of political representation and have become agencies of entrenched interests and the state administration.4 For this reason, left-libertarian parties not only establish new policy agendas but also strive to transform European systems as well as the internal workings of political parties. Within their own parties, left-libertarians would like to see a new politics of organizational form embodying open, transparent, and decentralist patterns of intraparty decision making prevail over top-down organization. In the broader political system, as a general prescription, left-libertarian parties call for a devolution of the party state. Practically, this involves