Why do local party organizations succeed in some settings but fail in others? The purpose of this chapter is to start providing explanations for the varied trajectories of subnational party organizations. This chapter looks at how endogenous factors affect local organizational development. The first part of this chapter seeks to utilize insights from the broader literature on political parties and the extant literature on far right parties to analyze how endogenous (party-specific) factors might account for variation in local organizational outcomes. It focuses on two characteristics of extremist right-wing parties that affect their development: they are charismatic and movement parties. The remainder of the chapter utilizes insights from dozens of interviews with Golden Dawn functionaries and thousands of party documents to trace how endogenous factors affected the trajectory of local party branches. The second section looks at factors that are specific to the national party and the third section examines whether organizational outcomes are endogenous to the local units themselves.

Uruguay’s Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA) is a mass-organic institutionalized leftist party. It is a deviant case that helps explicate the reproduction of mass-organic party organization and activism. The peculiar internal structure of the FA and the rules that ensure a role for grassroots activists in the highest decision-making bodies of the party are a product of the extraordinary conditions that existed at the time of the party’s birth in 1971. The intense autonomous activism that occurred during this stage acts as a historical cause. The decision-making authority of the grassroots activists, granted incrementally since the FA’s foundational stage, enables activists to block changes that reduce their power, engendering a lock-in effect and positive feedback. These rules grant FA activists a significant voice, which imbues activists´ participation with a strong sense of efficacy. This perceived efficacy operates as a selective incentive for activists to engage with the party. The chapter develops this theoretical argument and justifies the selection of the FA as a deviant case of party reproduction.