Commonwealth & Comparative Politics

ISSN: 1466-2043 (Print) 1743-9094 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fccp20

National party structure in parliamentary

federations: subcontracting electoral mobilisation
in Canada and Australia

Royce Koop & Campbell Sharman

To cite this article: Royce Koop & Campbell Sharman (2015) National party structure in
parliamentary federations: subcontracting electoral mobilisation in Canada and Australia,
Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 53:2, 177-196, DOI: 10.1080/14662043.2015.1013294

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Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 2015
Vol. 53, No. 2, 177– 196, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14662043.2015.1013294

National party structure in parliamentary federations:

subcontracting electoral mobilisation in Canada and
Australia
∗
Royce Koopa and Campbell Sharmanb
a
Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba, 532 Fletcher Argue,
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada; bDepartment of Political Science,
University of British Columbia, C-425—1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, British
Columbia V6T 1Z1, Canada

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.
Keywords: federalism; parliamentary systems; Canada; Australia; party
organisation

A distinguishing characteristic of federations is the availability of multiple

forums for electoral competition, each with a significant area of legislative
and administrative autonomy. Since the work of Riker (1964), the way in
which parties exploit this diversity and its effect on the operation and persist-
ence of federal systems has been a topic of continuing research (Bednar,
2009; Filippov, Ordeshook, & Shvetsova, 2003; Smiley, 1987).
In parliamentary federations, given that the control of one or more parlia-
mentary components in the federal system is the goal of most parties, parties
can select contests where they have the greatest chance of success. But this

∗
Corresponding author. Email: royce.koop@umanitoba.ca

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

178 R. Koop and C. Sharman
diversity creates a coordination problem for a party seeking national office.
Should the party form a hierarchical structure aiming to control all aspects of
party activity from the formation of government policy to the mobilisation of
voters across the whole federation? Or should it subcontract regional com-
ponents of its electoral and campaign organisations to semi-autonomous
local bodies or pre-existing subnational parties with similar political goals?
This dilemma may be less clear in parliamentary federations created by
devolution or where there has been a tradition of strong national parties. In
both these cases, there is likely to be a presumption favouring coordination
through an extensive national party hierarchy even though there may be
strong pressures to accommodate the ambitions of subnational party elites
and governments. Spain has shown that national parties can adjust a hierarch-
ical structure to cope with the growth of subnational autonomous communities
(Fabre, 2011; Wilson, 2012), and German national parties have maintained a
large degree of central control since the creation of the current German federa-
tion in 1949, even though this has been modified by German reunification after
1990 (Detterbeck, 2012; Detterbeck & Renzsch, 2003). And the choice of elec-
toral system can have an effect: proportional representation involving party lists
is more amenable to central party involvement in the electoral process than a
system based on single member districts.
From this perspective, Canada and Australia are outliers. Both parliamen-
tary federations – Canada from 1867 and Australia in 1901 – were formed
initially by the aggregation of self-governing communities, each with a
strong tradition of political autonomy. At federation, the subnational com-
ponents had the rudiments of local party systems based on geographically
defined electoral districts using plurality voting. These electoral system charac-
teristics were adopted for the lower house of the new national parliament in
each federation and have changed little since then.1 As national parties
emerged, they did so from parliamentary groupings dependent on local politics
rather than pre-existing national movements, and became coordinating
agencies for national policies rather than hierarchical bodies covering the full
range of partisan activity.
We argue that national parties in Canada and Australia, despite the signifi-
cant differences in their federal systems, have remained similarly dependent for
their success in mobilising supporters and voters on a network of subnational
partisan activity over which they have, at best, only limited control. Our analy-
sis illuminates the resilience of this organisational form for over a century;
party organisations in Canada and Australia have adapted to substantial
changes in social context, political expectations and communication technol-
ogy but have moved through a similar sequence of structural changes none
of which have altered the fundamental arrangements that flow from the incen-
tives embedded in their federal origins.
 Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 179
This form of national party organisation applies to both federations even
though they differ markedly in the degree of party congruence; Australian
party competition is similar at both national and subnational levels while
Canada has patterns of subnational party competition which are, with some
notable exceptions, largely decoupled from the national pattern (Dyck, 1991;
Esselment, 2010; Pruysers 2014; Thorlakson, 2007). Nevertheless, we find
broad similarities in national party operation between these two parliamentary
federations. These findings provide a challenge to an assumption that party
organisations in federations are reflections of the degree of electoral congru-
ence between the national and subnational levels.
In the analysis below we examine the organisational requirements for
national parties, the evolution of the two largest party groupings in each federa-
tion over the last century, and chart the maintenance of their distinctive style of
national party organisation notwithstanding the large changes in the social and
political context. We conclude by analysing some implications of our findings
for the study of parties in federations.

National organisations: requirements and obstacles

Parliamentary federations require national political parties to fulfil two critical
requirements if they are to be successful. The first is parliamentary coordi-
nation; leaders must weld members of the lower house of the national parlia-
ment into a coherent party to sustain a government or parliamentary
opposition. The second is mobilisation of support in the electorate to win elec-
tions. In the case of Canada and Australia, to gain office under single-member
electoral systems, parties must win individual victories in seats across the entire
federation, a challenging demand given the geographical size and dispersed
populations of these federations. Fulfiling the first requirement generates
strong parliamentary parties dominated by their leaders; fulfiling the second
in these federations has made national parties dependent on coalitions of
electoral districts or subnational parties to organise electoral support for
national party candidates. Both these characteristics spring from the dispersed
nature of subnational political communities – reinforced by strong regional
loyalties – which required the adoption of a federal form of government in
the first place.
While parties in unitary parliamentary democracies face similar challenges
in combining parliamentary coordination with the need to mobilise a dispersed
and diverse electorate, federal institutions create additional obstacles. The first
is the existence of regional party elites at the provincial or state level who stand
between the national party and grassroots partisan activity, whether or not these
elites are part of the formal structure of the national party (note van Biezen &
Hopkin, 2006; Kramer, 2000). These influential partisans are likely to have a
180 R. Koop and C. Sharman
primary focus on subnational politics, and their activities complicate the task of
national parties in defining a party space which is distinctly national.
Regional party elites are linked to the second obstacle that must be over-
come by national parties in parliamentary federation: the existence of powerful
subnational governments (provinces in Canada, states in Australia). These sub-
national governments are heavily involved in the delivery of the great bulk of
the day-to-day services expected of government in those democracies, includ-
ing the sensitive policy areas of health, education, land use, urban planning,
local government, transportation and the administration of justice. Problemati-
cally for national parties, political influence and patronage in these fields is
largely a matter of subnational politics and generate powerful links between
local electorates and subnational parties. This means that national parties are
forced to cope with the presence of powerful government actors with strong
incentives to preserve their political autonomy.
The following sections trace the development of party structures in federal
parliamentary systems given the presence of these requirements and obstacles.
The parties chosen for analysis have been the two parties in each federation
which have dominated national political contests and formed national govern-
ments over more than one hundred years. All four parties have had periods of
internal turmoil, and both the Conservative Party of Canada and the Liberal
Party of Australia have had to reinvent themselves several times during the
period. The pairing of Labor and Liberal in Australia fits a familiar left- and
right-leaning dichotomy that is not matched in Canada with its more compli-
cated social structure and brokerage tradition. And national politics in both
federations has been challenged by party insurgencies, some with lasting
effects on the party system, most notably the New Democratic Party since
the 1960s in Canada, and the Country (now National) Party since the 1920s
in Australia. But the two largest parties in each federation have been the ben-
eficiaries of the natural bifurcation of parliamentary politics and have persisted
as the agencies through which national governments have been formed.

Liberal Party of Canada

Canada represents the archetypal case of a federally decoupled party system
with widely differing patterns of partisan competition at national and provincial
elections (Wolinetz & Carty, 2006). The evolution of the Liberal Party shows
how Canada’s traditionally most successful party in national politics has
achieved this status with little in the way of a national party organisation dis-
tinct from its parliamentary leadership.
The Liberal Party had emerged as a national parliamentary party soon after
Confederation in 1867. The party in this early period was characterised by the
dominance of the party leader chosen by caucus, and the caucus itself.
 Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 181
Significant national organisation in this period ‘was neither needed nor desired’
(Wolinetz, 2007, p. 182). Instead, once in office, national ministers maintained
informal links with provincial Liberal organisations to conduct national elec-
tion campaigns. Access to government patronage allowed these regional min-
isters to construct formidable regional and local networks loyal to national
parliamentarians. As Regenstreif observed, this arrangement amounted to the
‘use of the cabinet as the mode of organising the country’ (1963, p. 216).
This regionalised, patronage-driven model of party organisation, run largely
by members of the national cabinet, existed in various forms until challenged
by the defeat of the Liberal Party at the 1957 election.
There were relatively few attempts to develop an autonomous national
organisation outside the parliamentary party to coordinate the activities of pro-
vincial and local groups. Defeat at the 1911 and 1917 elections caused Laurier
(prime minister 1896– 1911) as leader to involve himself in the development of
three extra-parliamentary national organisations; the Central Liberal Infor-
mation Office, the National Liberal Advisory Committee (NLAC) and the
National Liberal Organisation Committee. But these organisations were
immediately plagued by a lack of funds. They also struggled to reconcile them-
selves with powerful parliamentarians and local Liberal Party organisations.
One lasting innovation from this period, however, was the instigation of a
national convention to choose the party leader in 1919, prompted by the
death of Laurier during the preparations for a national policy convention (see
Courtney, 1973).
The defeat of the Liberal government under King in 1930 (prime minister
1921 – 1926, 1926– 1930 and 1935 – 1948) prompted the founding of the
National Liberal Federation (NLF) in 1932. While out of office, the party fell
back on this embryonic organisation to coordinate the activities of provincial
campaign organisations during the 1935 campaign. But when the Liberals
won that election, King oversaw a return to the old patronage system (Whitaker
1977, pp. 164– 165). As a result, the NLF languished.
The Liberal defeat in 1957 provided an opportunity for those who wanted
the establishment of a permanent national organisation, separate from and inde-
pendent of provincial Liberal parties (see Koop, 2011, pp. 17– 20). Reformers
within the party were critical of the old regionalised patronage-driven form of
structure and favoured the development of an exclusively national organisation
that would be capable of conducting truly ‘pan-Canadian’ national election
campaigns (Smith, 1981, pp. 52– 53). However, it was not entirely clear
what role the National Liberal Federation and its various components would
play following the implementation of these reforms. Furthermore, the accep-
tance of formal separation of the national and provincial Liberal parties was
offset by the informal efforts of national leaders to secure the support of provin-
cial premiers and parties (Clarkson, 2005, pp. 41– 42).
182 R. Koop and C. Sharman
Periods of sporadic organisational reform since the 1960s have led to the
expansion of the National Executive – originally set up in 1932 as part of
the NLF – and the creation of a council of constituency association presidents,
first proposed in 1985 but not set up until 2006. The National Executive over-
sees the management and finances of the party and, with the consent of the
leader, appoints other officials throughout the national organisation. The
Council of Presidents includes members of the National Executive and, all con-
stituency association presidents, one for each of the more than 300 electoral dis-
tricts for the Canadian House of Commons (Liberal Party of Canada, 2009,
p. 13). While the Council of Presidents has the potential to coordinate national
and local activities, its unwieldy size and advisory role is likely to undermine its
significance. The party’s biennial conventions represent opportunities to elect
members of the National Executive and debate and adopt policy resolutions
that originate primarily from the constituency associations. But no one is
under any illusion that the party leader is bound by these policy resolutions
during election campaigns.
While the party leader has retained the ability to formulate policy during
election campaigns without reference to party manifestos, the party’s local
organisations have kept the right to both recruit and nominate individual
candidates (Cross & Young, 2013). The National Executive may intervene
by allowing certain candidates to stand despite their not having been
party members for the required period and may change the timing of nomi-
nation contests. These party rules supplement the power enjoyed by party
leaders under the Canada Elections Act since the early 1970s to de-
certify constituency associations and requires all candidates to be endorsed
by the party leader. Despite its availability, the power to disallow locally
selected candidates has in fact been exercised sparingly as leaders are
eager to avoid the negative responses of local activists (Koop & Bittner,
2011, p. 437).
For the Canadian Liberal Party, success at national elections since 1867 has
been achieved without a national organisation which extended much beyond its
leadership and parliamentary party, and sporadic leadership conventions. Until
1957, the party was heavily dependent on patronage networks and informal
links with provincial Liberal parties and local associations. Since then, it has
distanced itself from provincial Liberal parties and relied on local district
associations, loosely supervised by national bodies reliant on the direction of
the parliamentary leadership.

Conservative Party of Canada

The evolution of the organisation of the Conservative Party has been similar to
that of the Liberal Party. As with the Liberals, periods in opposition have
 Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 183
spurred calls for the development of a national organisation, and the Conserva-
tives have seen many more of these periods than the Liberal Party.
Under Macdonald (prime minister 1867– 1873, 1878 – 1891), the organis-
ation of the party provided the model subsequently adopted by the Liberal
Party under Laurier. Macdonald personified the party in the eyes of the
public. He maintained a loose control over the party by means of personal con-
tacts in provincial parties and local organisations of all kinds. Without Macdo-
nald’s electoral appeal the party struggled to develop an organisation that would
lend continuity to the party during periods out of office (English, 1977, pp. 31–
32). Borden (prime minister 1911– 1917, 1917 – 1920), following defeat in the
1904 election, responded to this challenge by falling back on the party’s organ-
isational ties to provincial Conservative parties (Bakvis, 1991, p. 39). In the
province of British Columbia, for example, cooperation led to the national
and provincial Conservative organisations becoming ‘completely merged’ in
the lead-up to the 1911 campaign (English, 1977, fn. 36). In particular,
Borden relied on provincial organisations to conduct national election cam-
paigns in the provinces.
As with the Liberals, when extra-parliamentary Conservative organisations
were set up, they struggled to find a role in the party, and quickly fell into
disuse. The Liberal-Conservative Association of Canada was created in
1924, a body which had few powers and was run by a single party official.
In 1938, a meeting of the party approved a resolution to create the National
Conservative Council, but the Council never met. As Williams notes, ‘attempts
to reorganise the party had been attempted, but all had failed’ (1999, p. 194).
Following the Liberal example, the Conservatives moved from caucus selec-
tion of the leader to a national convention selection for most party leaders
after the retirement of Bennett (prime minister 1930 – 1935).
In 1942, a party convention approved the creation of the Dominion Pro-
gressive Conservative Association. Spurred by a series of Conservative elec-
tion defeats from 1935 to 1953, the Association maintained a national office,
held conventions, and attempted to coordinate the activities of the provincial
Conservative parties and local associations, but with only limited success.
But the Association made clear that any policy resolutions adopted would
not be binding on the party. Indeed, these resolutions would be of value only
because they were suggestions ‘which were to be considered by the leader
and the caucus’ (Williams, 1999, p. 196). This situation persisted into the
1970s, when a party newsletter reported that delegates to the party convention
‘were invited to vote on some 350 resolutions that will act as a guide to the
leader in the exposition of where the Progressive Conservative Party stands
on what’ (quoted in Perlin, 1980, p. 15). Clearly, this was a national extra-par-
liamentary organisation that was subordinate to the leader and the parliamen-
tary party.
184 R. Koop and C. Sharman
Since 2003, the Conservative Party’s National Council has dominated the
party’s national organisation, and Stephen Harper (prime minister since
2006) in turn dominates the Council (Flanagan, 2013). The Council contains
11 party members who are elected at national conventions at the same time
as the leader, together with the chair of the party’s fundraising apparatus, and
the party’s executive director. While the leader must sit on the Council, MPs
are prohibited from doing so. The Council’s most important powers relate to
local constituency associations and nominations; the Council must formally
recognise constituency associations, must approve potential nomination candi-
dates, and has the power to oversee local candidate selection processes. As
party leader, Harper has occasionally disallowed the selection of local candi-
dates, but where local candidates have been rejected, it has been the president
of the National Council and the party’s executive director, not Harper, who
have often taken responsibility.
Both the Liberal and Conservative parties have operated successfully in
Canadian national politics with little in the way of national party organisation
outside the parliamentary party, the party leadership and, since the 1920s,
national conventions for the choice of party leader. Both parties relied on
patronage networks and informal links with provincial parties until the
1950s, after which there were pressures for formal party structures at the
national level to supplement local district organisations. But these local
bodies have continued to bear the responsibility for selecting candidates and
running local campaigns in all but exceptional circumstances. Changes in cam-
paign methods and in the extent of government regulation of parties have meant
that national parties have broader responsibilities and more administrative and
technical resources, but their focus remains on providing support for the
national party leadership.

Liberal Party of Australia

Since 1910, Australia has seen politics at both state and national levels strongly
shaped by contests between the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Liberal
Party (under various names). While there have been important regional vari-
ations in the insurgence of minor parties, and some states have supported a
rural based National Party (formerly the Country Party) in coalition with the
Liberal Party, contests for the control of national and all state governments
in Australia have been fought overwhelmingly on a Labor, Liberal divide
(Sharman & Moon, 2003, pp. 241 – 247).
The Liberal Party of Australia, in spite of its reorganisations and name
changes, has a history which is similar to Canadian national parties until the
1940s. At federation in 1901, Australia was in the throes of moving from a
system of parliamentary politics where governments were supported by shifting
 Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 185
coalitions of ministerialists, to one where governments could rely on parlia-
mentary majorities stabilised by party discipline. By 1910, the success of the
ALP in national politics with its pledge-bound candidates and parliamentary
majority had prompted the fusion of anti-Labor parties to form the Liberal
Party. These parties had had almost no continuing organisation outside the
need to mobilise support for elections (Loveday, 1977, p. 451). After 1910, a
framework was established for consultation between state Liberal parties
which was based on sporadic meetings of a federal conference and federal
executive with equal state representation, with provision for a secretariat. But
these arrangements had hardly any impact on the state-based organisation of
national politics.
This pattern persisted during the two major realignments in anti-Labor poli-
tics following the First World War and the onset of the Depression, which com-
bined to keep the ALP out of national office for all but three years between
1917 and 1941. In 1917, Liberal parliamentarians supported an ALP prime
minister, Hughes (prime minister 1915 – 1923), who defected from his party
over the issue of conscription to form a new anti-Labor party, the Nationalists,
which held office from 1917 to 1929. Returning to power in 1929 in time for
the turbulent politics of the Depression, an ALP government under Scullin
(prime minister 1929 – 1932) again suffered crippling defections from the par-
liamentary party, this time over economic policy. In 1931, a former ALP federal
minister, Lyons, became the leader of a populist inspired United Australia Party
(UAP) which defeated the ALP in a landslide victory in 1932. The UAP held
office, either alone or in coalition with the Country Party from 1931 to 1941.
Electoral success in national politics was not matched by the creation of any
extensive national party organisation. The Nationalists followed the federally
organised party structure adopted by the Liberal Party after 1910 which was
dependent on state parties. Despite its limitations, this arrangement gave the
Nationalists, ‘the semblance of a national administrative and coordinating insti-
tution’ (Lloyd, 2001, p. 157), but there was no suggestion that these bodies had
any part to play in the selection of candidates and only the most limited role in
the formation of party policy. The organisation of national election campaigns
remained a state party concern, with some assistance from the leader and his
team in framing campaign themes and raising funds.
In the turmoil of Depression politics, the UAP was the successor to the
Nationalist party apparatus, but the populist groups and business interests
which had played an active part in the formation of the UAP were not easily
accommodated within the party. Lloyd (2001) argues that the UAP had
almost no national party structure outside the parliamentary party and a
small federal secretariat, its electoral success being largely dependent on the
continuing disarray of the ALP and the campaigning skills of Lyons until his
death in 1939. Three state parties chose not to adopt the UAP party name;
186 R. Koop and C. Sharman
this foreshadowed the fate of the UAP which fell apart at the federal level after
losing office in 1941 amid personal and factional disputes, interest group rival-
ries, and disarray over the organisation of government during wartime
(Hancock, 2000, pp. 10– 23).
By 1945, the anti-Labor groups and parties which had sprung up with the
collapse of the UAP formed a new party, the Liberal Party, under the leadership
of Menzies (prime minister 1939– 1941, 1949 – 1966). Both the goals and the
organisation of the new Liberal Party differed from its predecessors (see gen-
erally Hancock, 2000; Martin, 1999, pp. 1 – 29). While critical of the Labor
Party government’s centralising plans for postwar reconstruction and hostile
to the socialist aims of some members of the Labor Party, the Liberals accepted
an interventionist role for government in both the economy and in the provision
of social welfare. Menzies, who had bitter memories of the influence of
business interests within the UAP, was keen to establish a party which had a
nation-wide organisation with a broadly based membership, and which had
funding arrangements that insulated it from the demands of a few large donors.
The structure of the new party was strictly federal with equal representation
for each state on a Federal Council and a Federal Executive. In spite of pro-
cedures for discussing policy, the parliamentary leader of the party retained
the final say on policy questions. At the grass roots, efforts were made to
attract a wide membership with an extensive network of paid and voluntary
workers, but these arrangements were under the control of the state divisions
of the party, as was the responsibility for the endorsement of candidates for
national elections. Each state division was solely responsible for the conduct
of state party matters and there was no power for the national party to intervene
even in matters which directly affected the success of the national party. This
did not prevent state divisions from exchanging personnel or seeking advice,
expertise and resources from the federal secretariat.
The Liberal Party won national office in 1949 and was in government for
over 40 of the succeeding 58 years until the Howard government’s defeat in
2007 (1949– 1972, 1975 – 1983, 1996 – 2007). Its party structure has remained
substantially unchanged over this period although, after each loss of office there
has been a major review of the party organisation and pressures for the national
party to adopt a less federal and more national structure. But the party remains
dominated by the parliamentary party and its leader whose main concern has
been the need to win national elections; the selection of candidates and the
grass roots contact between the party and voters remains a matter for the
state divisions, notwithstanding campaigning advice and information from
the party’s databases produced by the national office.
Unlike the Canadian Liberal Party which, in the quest for a stronger
national party organisation in the 1950s sought to insulate itself from provincial
Liberal parties, the restructuring of the Australian Liberal Party in the 1940s
 Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 187
chose to formalise and enhance the national party’s links with state parties and
to build a national party organisation which was dependent on state parties for
all party functions except those relating directly to the parliamentary leadership
and, more recently, the coordination of national election campaigns. But, in
both federations, the national party organisations have been dominated by
the policy concerns of the leadership and the parliamentary parties, with little
influence over the conduct of day-to-day party politics in the electorate.

Australian Labor Party

The current ALP appears to be the ideal candidate for a highly integrated party
dominated by a national machine. The national party has the constitutional
power to intervene in all aspects of the party’s operation, state and national,
from setting policy goals for the party and disaffiliating state branches, to over-
turning delegate selection processes (Australian Labor Party, 2014, p. 236). The
manner in which the national party operates – as opposed to its nominal struc-
ture – shows the same pattern of dominance of the national party by the par-
liamentary leadership coupled with dependence on regional agencies for
candidate selection and other party functions.2
The ALP emerged as a union-based, social democratic mass party in the
1890s. Its success in colonial (state) politics in the years leading up to federa-
tion in 1901 made many in the party suspicious of federation as a device to
check the growing influence of the ALP at state level. But, by 1910, the
party achieved majority government and control of both houses in the new
Commonwealth Parliament, an electoral success which reinforced a major rea-
lignment of the anti-Labor parties in national politics. While the ALP has been
in national office for only a third of the period since federation, the party has
usually had the largest vote share of any party at national elections since
1910 and, in spite of periods of turmoil, has formed the government or the
alternative government in national politics ever since.
The ALP at state level has been characterised by a strong commitment to
rank and file control of party platforms and policies, the participation of del-
egates from affiliated unions in the decisions of the party, the election of
party officials, and the requirement that ALP candidates, if elected, are
pledged to follow the party platform and the decisions of the parliamentary
party. After federation, the party established a Federal Conference in 1902,
and a Federal Executive in 1915 (Crisp, 1955). But these federal bodies did
not replicate the close relationship between the state party machines and
state parliamentary parties; they had no direct link to the membership of the
party or its affiliated unions. The Federal Conference met every two or three
years, and the Federal Executive twice a year; the federal party had no full-
time secretary until 1949, and no permanent secretariat until 1973. Candidates
188 R. Koop and C. Sharman
for federal elections were chosen by the state parties and federal election cam-
paigns were largely the responsibility of state organisations. Until 1967, the
federal bodies were composed of delegates chosen by the state ALP parties
– six delegates from each state to the Federal Conference, and two to the
Federal Executive – who were bound to vote on most issue as instructed by
their state parties. Decisions of the national party on policy and the party plat-
form were made by coalitions of state party factions.
Until the 1970s, the only continuing manifestation of the ALP in national
politics was the federal caucus – the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party
(FPLP) – and its leader who was chosen by caucus. The lack of an established
party machine at the national level enhanced the discretion of the parliamentary
leadership and gave the FPLP considerable authority over the party’s stance on
national issues even though the Federal Conference was responsible for
framing the party’s platform (Crisp, 1955; Faulkner & Macintyre, 2001).
Notwithstanding the sporadic existence of the Federal Conference and
Executive, these bodies were granted the power to intervene in state branches
of the party, override their decisions, and even to dissolve a state branch of the
ALP and create a new one. These powers were acquired as a consequence of
major splits within the party, the most important being the split over conscrip-
tion in 1916 –1917, the series of interventions into the rebel New South Wales
branch to set up new state executives over the period from 1927 to 1941, and
the split in 1955 which led to the creation of the breakaway Democratic Labor
Party. But these draconian powers could only be used if a majority of state del-
egates were willing to support intervention against another state branch.
Changes to the Federal Conference in 1967 heralded a period of organis-
ational change in the party which came to a head in 1981. A series of electoral
defeats at the federal elections of 1975, 1977 and 1980 helped to precipitate a
major restructuring of the national organisation. The federal basis for state rep-
resentation in the structure of a new National Conference was maintained, but
matched by an equal number of delegates selected in proportion to the number
of seats from each state in the House of Representatives, increasing the voting
weight of the larger states (Lloyd, 1983). This nationalising process has contin-
ued so that, by 1994, the National Executive of the party was elected from the
floor of the National Conference rather than by state branches (Lloyd, 2000),
and by 2007 representation was broadened to that the triennial National Con-
ference was increased in size to 400 delegates.
How significant were the changes? The National Executive has been much
more assertive and has used its powers vigorously to intervene in state branches
on a range of procedural issues. But its interventions are sporadic and limited
and the dominant criterion for intervention has been actions by state branches
which are seen to prejudice the electoral success of the party at national elec-
tions. As described in detail by Mills (2014), the administrative machinery of
 Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 189
the party in Canberra has grown a great deal in size and professionalism, but its
goal has been to further the goals of the party as articulated by the parliamen-
tary leadership and has been driven by the need for electoral success and the
complexities of media management in national campaigns. The National Con-
ference has grown, but it has become a media event where factions in the party
fight over the wording of a national platform which may have little bearing on
the electoral strategy of the national leadership.
Even though no longer based on equal state representation, National Con-
ference delegates are chosen by a state-based process, much to the dismay of
those in the party who have pressed for a ‘national’ party (Encel, 2005). The
recruitment of candidates for the House of Representatives is still a matter
for the state branches of the party, even if the national party provides guidelines
as to how candidates are to be selected, and goals for gender balance. On
occasion, the national party may wish to parachute a high profile recruit into
a safe Labor seat or scramble to pick the best candidate for a national by-elec-
tion, but it can do this only with difficulty and with the acquiescence of the rel-
evant state executive. And the centre of gravity for factional activity and union
affiliation continues to be firmly based in the six state and two territory parties,
as is the machinery for rank and file membership and trade union affiliation.
In spite of its having an impressively centralised constitutional structure,
the ALP conforms to the same dynamics as other three national parties
reviewed in this paper – the national party is dominated by its parliamentary
leadership and dependent on subnational associations for the bulk of party
machine functions including the key tasks of candidate recruitment and electio-
neering in single member electoral districts.

Analysis
The survey above shows that each of the four national parties has a distinctive
organisational history as they coped with the political challenges of the last 100
years. But the trajectory of structural change for all four parties has been similar
and they follow the same developmental sequence.
This is summarised in Table 1 which shows that the structural evolution of
national parties can be seen as moving through three phases. From the perspec-
tive of the central party, the first phase relies entirely on the parliamentary
leader and caucus for party coordination. Chosen by caucus, the leader must
weld together the various geographical and sectional interests represented in
the parliamentary party to form a coherent body for effective control of the gov-
ernment or alternative government. The critical role of the leader in maintaining
the support of caucus has continued but has been progressively supplemented
by other structures. By the 1920s, all parties had experimented with national
meetings of party delegates from across the federation to discuss policy and
190 R. Koop and C. Sharman
Table 1. Development of national party organisations in Canada from 1867 and
Australia from 1901.
Phase 1 Phase 3 Party
Patronage administrative
networks Phase 2 Party networks organisations
Selection of Canada: Convention (from 1919) Convention
leader Caucus
Australia: Caucus Caucus and membership
Caucus ballot (ALP from
2013)
National party Leader & Leader & caucus Leader & caucus
coordination caucus
Occasional meetings of Periodic meetings of
national organisation national organisation
for policy discussion for policy discussion,
and administrative administrative
coordination (some coordination (by
parties by 1920s) 1940s)
Permanent, professional
secretariat responsible
to party leadership,
focused on media
management and
national elections
(from 1970s)
Candidate Electoral district Electoral district Canada: Electoral
selection & associations organisation with district organisation
electoral formal or informal (leader override for
activities subnational party candidate selection
involvement possible since 1970s
but infrequent)
Australia: State party and
electoral district
organisation (national
party override possible
for ALP candidate
selection since 1970s
but infrequent)

party administration, the most formalised being the federal conference and
executive of the ALP. This second phase saw both Canadian parties move
away from the selection of the leader by caucus to selection by a form of
party convention, a practice not followed in Australia.3 By the 1970s, the
third phase saw all parties accepting the need for a permanent national and pro-
fessional secretariat to support the parliamentary leadership, coordinate party
 Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 191
finance, and to respond to the increasingly complex task of running election
campaigns in the age of television and the internet (note van Onselen & Erring-
ton, 2004).
National party coordination has followed the same trajectory for all four
parties, but at different rates; the ALP was early in the field for the creation
of party representation at the national level and has moved furthest in granting
authority to its national body to shape party administration. Nonetheless, all
four parties now have national party structures that are broadly comparable
and have the same prime objective; the support of the parliamentary leadership
and the framing of national election campaigns.
Each of the national party coordination phases has been matched by a cor-
responding mode of mobilising electoral support. The first phase is consistent
with patronage networks and the absence of any national party organisation
outside the formation of electoral district associations at election time.
Again, the ALP is an exception in that, by the early 1900s, state parties and
their affiliated trade unions became indirectly associated with the national
party. This led to a divergence between the Canadian and Australian experience
in the second phase. While Canadian parties had a network of varying relation-
ships with provincial parties, Australian national parties experimented with
more formal relationships with their state counterparts; electoral district organ-
isations were supplemented by statewide party bodies, especially for the ALP.
The third and current phase has accentuated this difference. For Canada,
electoral district organisations continue to play the prime role in selecting can-
didates and mobilising local members and voters, even though both parties
have the power to override candidate selection shape party organisation at
the local level (see Sayers, 1999). For Australia, the state party organisations
are the gatekeepers for candidate selection and the administration of all local
party activities (Holmes & Sharman, 1977, pp. 102– 116). In the case of the
ALP, the national party occasionally overrides state party procedures.
This points to critical differences between the two federations, but it does
not alter the underlying dynamics of national party operation. In Canada,
there has been a longstanding tradition of local constituency control over the
choice of candidate even though, since the 1970s, there have been procedures
for an override of the selection of a particular candidate by the national party
leadership. By contrast, while Australian parties involve the local membership
to a greater or lesser extent in the choice of candidates, the state party machines
since the 1970s have played a much more active role in choosing candidates,
particularly so in the selection of candidates for the Labor Party. Even
though the national party executive may occasionally intervene, the state
branches of the party remain the dominant players in candidate selection.
But the striking characteristic of all four parties is that local electoral activi-
ties are not run by the national party. For Canada, this is left primarily to
192 R. Koop and C. Sharman
electoral district associations, to some extent a consequence of the lack of
matching provincial parties. For Australia, the task is taken up by state mani-
festations of the parties. In neither case does the national party have the organ-
isation to intervene in any but the occasional case of special concern to the
national leadership. Since federation, both party systems have been character-
ised by a disjunction between national party organisations and grass roots party
activity. Each federation may have seen national parties subcontract electoral
administration to different agencies, but for both federations, national parties
have remained focused on the needs of the national leadership rather than
the practicalities of party and voter mobilisation.

Implications
The principal finding of this study is that, after reviewing the history of the two
dominant national parties in Canada and Australia over the last 100 years, the
national parties in both federations have moved through a similar sequence of
structural changes, none of which has altered the their reliance on subnational
agencies for mobilising local support. This is so even though there are marked
difference between these federations in their patterns of party competition at
subnational elections and in the congruence between national and subnational
party systems.
The way in which the largest national parties in Canada and Australia have
adopted a similar mode of subcontracting the task of electoral mobilisation to
local and subnational party entities has several implications for the study of
multilevel political systems. One of the more striking is the evidence of the
long-term effects of the institutional context on the operation of the party
system. In this respect, Riker and Schaps (1957) may have overstated their
case for the disharmony generated by parliamentary federations (see
Sharman, 1994), but they have been correct in pointing to the importance of
constitutional structures in shaping the dynamics of the federal process. In
the cases under review, the pre-federation experience of self-government of
the units forming these federations by aggregation and, in particular, the power-
ful ‘infrastructural capacity’ (Ziblatt, 2006) of subnational governments in
Canada and Australia, both help to explain the persistence of the limited role
of national parties in the practicalities of local politics (note Sayers & Banfield,
2013). This has been reinforced by the reliance on single member districts for
the representatives of national lower houses.
The resilience of similar patterns of party organisation over a century of
dramatic political change can be seen as a challenge to the argument of those
who follow in the tradition of Livingston (1952) and rely on the dominance
of sociological or socio-linguistic forces in shaping the federal process (Erk,
2011; Erk & Koning, 2010). In a similar fashion, while there may be marked
 Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 193
differences in some measures of subnational policy autonomy and public
finance between Canada and Australia (Thorlakson, 2003), these appear to
have had only a limited effect on the operation of the major national parties
in the two federations. These parties can be seen to be more sensitive to the
structural logic of the similar set of national parliamentary institutions in
which they operate than they are to regional variations in the social and econ-
omic context.
It follows that the most important implication is one highlighted by
Deschouwer (2003); the study of parties in multilevel systems requires
careful consideration of the concepts used to analyse them. In the present
case, the similarities in the structure of national parties in Canada and Australia
is not consistent with the commonly used notion of party congruence
established by studies looking at the coincidence of national and subnational
partisan support in multilevel systems. This suggests that more attention
should be paid to the internal operation of parties as a way of blending the
insights from studies of partisanship in multilevel political systems with
those of the institutional dynamics of each federation.

Acknowledgements
We wish to thank both the anonymous reviewers as well as the Journal’s editor for their
advice.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes
1. The Australian House of Representatives has been elected from single member
electoral districts since 1901, but the electoral system was changed from plurality
voting to the alternative vote with effect from the general election in 1919. The
option of two-member electoral districts for the Canadian House of Commons
was removed in 1966; these two-member districts had only been used occasionally
(see Courtney, 2004, pp. 107 –109). All Canadian House of Commons elections
since 1867 have used plurality voting.
2. Thorlakson (2009), in a study of recent party constitutions in several federations,
argues that the ALP is a highly centralised party. Although the author notes the
possibility of practice diverging from constitutional forms, the findings of the
article rely on the assumption that, for the ALP, its constitution is an accurate
guide to the operation of the party.
3. In 2013, a new procedure was adopted for the selection of the leader of the Labor
Party which gave the vote of the caucus equal weight with a vote of the all members
of the Labor Party registered with each state and territory branch of the party (see
Australian Labor, 2013).
194 R. Koop and C. Sharman
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