Abstracts Political Science

How do political parties become transnational actors? An ethnographic study of Andean party politics in Barcelona

by Nicolas Jonathan Fliess

Party organisations are no longer limited to the domestic arena. A growing number of works has examined why parties become transnational actors, and how they campaign, and organize abroad. However, still largely unexplored is how parties become and remain transnational actors. Existing work investigates either the transnational activities of party organisations, or migrants, but not the interaction of both. The mechanisms that underpin the transnationalisation of political parties are therefore not fully understood yet. This thesis addresses this gap. I argue that parties must actively negotiate their entry and presence within migrant communities. I claim that emigrants often oppose the presence of parties, but that parties can partly overcome this resistance with a specific set of incentives, mobilization, recruitment, and linkage strategies. I situate my analysis in the relevant transnationalism and political science literatures. To empirically support my argument, I draw on 62 interviews with hard-to-reach key informants and 50 logged field reports, which I conducted during 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Barcelona. The comparative research design includes Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. First, I find that parties succeed as transnational actors when migrants can use them to produce collective goods in the home and host country. Migrants also engage when parties can stimulate emotional bonds, or offer political career opportunities. Second, successful transnational parties exploit informal networks and harness networks and organizational structures of local migrant organisations and Spanish parties. Finally, migrant organisations act as strong gatekeepers and force party chapters, who lack funding and political clout, to apply more aggressive, informal, and multi-layered linkage tactics. This thesis contributes to our understanding of transnational politics by providing first-hand, in-depth insights into how political parties establish a presence abroad, the challenges that they face, and how both home and host country factors shape this development.