Party-Building
Definition
The long-horizon work of building and maintaining a political party — the durable infrastructure that runs electoral campaigns across many cycles, recruits and develops candidates, and aggregates the policy work of the broader movement into a ballot line.
It is distinguished from electoral campaigning (which is a single cycle’s work) by its time horizon and its scope: party building assumes the party will exist in the next cycle, the cycle after, and the cycle after that, and designs its structures (membership, branches, internal democracy, candidate development) accordingly.
The practitioner craft (the German Sozialdemokratie, the Swiss SP Sektionshandbuch, the US party-building literature) treats the local branch as the active ingredient — a national party without functioning local branches is a campaign organisation, not a party. The SP Schweiz Sektionshandbuch 2 (“Kampagnen und Kommunikation”) is a section-level campaign-and-communications manual distributed free of charge to local party sections through the SP Schweiz Sektions-Shop and by email, accompanied by supplementary example documents intended to be adapted to local circumstances. [source: sp-schweiz-sektionshandbuch] That section-level autonomy to adapt templates is the operational form of the claim that the local branch is the active ingredient.
Full page: [[party-building]].
FAQ
What is party-building?
Party-building is the long-horizon work of building and maintaining a political party — the durable infrastructure that runs electoral campaigns across many cycles, recruits and develops candidates, and aggregates the policy work of the broader movement into a ballot line [source: sp-schweiz-sektionshandbuch]. It is distinguished from electoral campaigning (which is a single cycle’s work) by its time horizon and its scope.
What is the active ingredient of party-building?
The practitioner craft (the German Sozialdemokratie, the Swiss SP Sektionshandbuch, the US party-building literature) treats the local branch as the active ingredient — a national party without functioning local branches is a campaign organisation, not a party [source: sp-schweiz-sektionshandbuch]. The SP Schweiz Sektionshandbuch 2 (“Kampagnen und Kommunikation”) is a section-level campaign-and-communications manual distributed free of charge to local party sections through the SP Schweiz Sektions-Shop and by email.
How does party-building differ from electoral campaigning?
Party-building is distinguished from electoral campaigning by its time horizon and its scope: party building assumes the party will exist in the next cycle, the cycle after, and the cycle after that, and designs its structures (membership, branches, internal democracy, candidate development) accordingly [source: sp-schweiz-sektionshandbuch]. That section-level autonomy to adapt templates is the operational form of the claim that the local branch is the active ingredient.