The Geography of Political Parties: territory and organisational strategies in Buenos Aires

Abstract

How and why does geography inform the organisational strategies of political parties? Encuentro por la Democracia y la Equidad (Encounter for Democracy and Equity, hereafter EDE), is a centre-left Argentine political party that, since arriving in Buenos Aires in 2008, quickly became one of the largest oppositional parties in the city in terms of its activist base and electoral representation. This was achieved by explicitly prioritising a territorial organisational strategy: building the party at the scale of the neighbourhood by opening branches, accumulating activists and constructing linkages with civil society. Through a qualitative analysis of EDE’s organisational strategy over ten years (2008-2018) the paper proposes four dimensions for understanding the relationship between grassroots territorial organising and party strategy: party-building; electoral success; democratic linkages; and alliance building. The findings are of relevance not only to party-building in Latin America but also to the recent surge of territorial organising in parties in Europe. The paper makes three contributions to geographical literature. First, it adds to limited Anglophone geographical engagements with Latin American electoral and party politics by highlighting the centrality of spatiality to party-building. Second, it emphasises sub-national dynamics of party organising, contributing to a dismantling of methodological state centrism that pervades party scholarship. Third, it develops a geographical analytical approach to party organisation that demonstrates how sociospatial relations constitute parties’ unfolding relations with the state and civil society.