Linking Party Strategies With Organizational Change

Abstract

In the last decades of the twentieth century, leaders of the largest parties in Britain and Germany began reexamining their parties’ organizational strategies to find new ways to use party members to generate electoral support. Evidence from party documents and debates shows that this change was both deliberate and intentional. In apparent defiance of Michels's ‘iron law of oligarchy’, party leaders seem to have been willing to give new rights to members in order to attract and maintain active party memberships.