The following article applies the principal-agent model to the politics of institutional design, that is, the relationship between representatives and their intra-party constituencies, in three social democratic parties. It examines whether the principal-agent thesis provides a useful methodological tool for the analysis of intra-party struggles over organizational distributions of power. The study concludes that the model is indeed applicable to the study of internal decision-making processes and conflict, but that a more rigorous test and application is necessary to fully ascertain its methodological and theoretical value for the study of political parties in general.
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