Browsing by Subject "Autonomy"

Parties in federal states are active on multiple levels. While attention has been given to multi-level parties and the multi-party system in general circumstances, less research has been done on how these parties act during campaigns. One of the latest trends in political campaigning is the so-called grassroots campaigning. Grassroots campaigning takes the party members at the center of the campaign and uses them as facilitators of the party’s political message in various ways. The party Alliance 90/ The Greens in Germany embraces this grassroots democracy principle and is, therefore, the optimal case to analyze. The unit where most of the party members accumulate in the German party system is the district association. To see how grassroots campaigning works within a multi-level party, this thesis aims to examine the interactions between the Greens district associations with the federal association's campaign during the federal election campaign 2021. The research data consists of six semi-structured interviews with campaign managers of the Greens parties’ district associations who were active during the federal election campaign 2021. The interview transcripts are analyzed by using a qualitative content analysis method to gain knowledge of prominent and reoccurring categories of the campaign managers' experiences during the federal election campaign. The analysis showed that the campaign managers' district associations primarily focused on the mobilization of party members as well as the localizing of politics. Furthermore, the data showed that the campaign managers do not see any influence from their side on the federal election campaign besides the formal influence through assemblies. However, they experienced different forms of autonomy which is in line with the theoretical construct of grassroots campaigning. Last, of all, the data revealed a lack of transparency from the federal campaign side. The outcomes of this study indicate the main tasks of the district associations as mobilization of members and localization of politics. Additionally, the district association seems to have a rather high amount of autonomy within the federal campaign, but on the contrary, the side might not be able to influence the federal association's campaign as such. Nevertheless, this study provides the first research on the aspect of multi-level campaigning and thereby addresses the gap in the literature on political campaigning.