Intra-party Power Research Articles

New people, new policy: How personnel renewal in the party executive affects party policy change. The case of Austria

The party organization literature has long acknowledged that changes in a party’s internal power structure bring about changes in leadership personnel. However, empirical assessments of how such personnel changes relate to party behavior are rare. We explore personnel renewal in the party executive as a driver of party policy change and argue that focusing on these processes provides for an encompassing perspective on the connection between intra-party power and party behavior. Building on the party change literature, we theorize on personnel renewal in the party executive as a potential stand-alone driver of party policy change as well as on its interplay with other explanatory factors and test empirical implications based on all major Austrian parties (1949–2019). Findings suggest that personnel renewal in the party executive has a profound effect on party policy and that these personnel changes are in part driven by party performance.

Bending the Iron Law: The distribution of power within political parties

AbstractHow do political parties share power internally? We study the internal organization of political parties as the solution of a moral hazard problem between a party conference and its factions. Factions' mobilization efforts benefit the party electorally, but can only be imperfectly monitored. In contrast with the logic of Michel's Iron Law, we provide a functionalist rationale for intraparty power sharing: We show that internal power sharing can enhance a party's electoral performance. This effect is stronger in settings that award more resources to election winners: Low interparty power sharing produces high intraparty power sharing. We also show that intraparty power sharing should be more frequent within smaller parties, when monitoring of factional effort is more precise (e.g., preferential voting systems), and when factions' ideological disagreements span multiple dimensions.

Rokkan Rules? Communist Elites and the Choice of Electoral Systems in the Yugoslav Republics, 1989–1990

We use the previously neglected cases of the Yugoslav republics to revisit the question of how electoral systems were formed for the first elections during the transition from communism in 1989–1990. By exploring archival and other sources created contemporaneously by the relevant decision-makers, we build on Rokkanian interpretations of electoral system design. Unlike Rokkan, however, we do not see parties as unitary or united actors. Our analysis instead focuses on the leadership and the dominant wings of the ruling parties and shows that their preferences regarding electoral rules served their intra-party ambitions and reflected their intra-party power capacities.

Serving the People or Serving the Party?: The Utilisation of Lei Feng in Chinese Elite Politics

Comrade Lei Feng, a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, is renowned in China as a national role model, famed for his routine altruism rather than for any acts of exceptional braveness or daring. Over the years, a number of national campaigns have been launched to emulate the behaviour of Lei Feng, with the objective of improving public morality. But the campaigns have also been an important source of political legitimacy, particularly for Mao Zedong. This is because Lei was widely propagated as an ardent Maoist who studied the ideas of Mao by night and implemented them by day, presenting a shining example of benevolent Maoism which assisted Mao’s return to the helm of Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution. Less well-documented, and the focus of this article, is the utilisation of Lei Feng by Mao’s elite colleagues in their own personal quests for political ascent. In the internecine intra-party power struggle to succeed Mao as paramount leader, separate rival factions led by each of the Gang of Four, Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng heaped praise on Lei Feng to demonstrate their own devotion to Mao. As the power struggles intensified, each of the candidates also used Lei to besmirch the political credentials of their opponents by suggesting that they were anti-Lei, by implication anti-Mao.

The intra-party bargain over ministerial appointments: how party leader performance affects the ‘partyness’ of government

In parliamentary democracies, the logic of delegation from voters to government requires that political parties control government actions. Recruiting government personnel through the party organisation is the primary mechanism for parties to retain such a dominance over the government. Existing research has examined secular trends and cross-sectional variance in ministers’ party ties, mostly focussing on appointments of party members to government office. By contrast, this article centres on the appointment of members of the party elite as a yardstick for party control over government. It explores short-term variance in the ‘partyness’ of appointments, arguing that performance-related shifts in the intra-party power balance condition party elites’ access to ministerial office. Utilising data on ministerial appointments in Austria (1945–2017; n = 603), the article demonstrates that successful party leaders can relax party control by minimising appointments of party elite members, while relatively unsuccessful leaders have to compensate party elites with government jobs.

Analysing intra-party power: Swedish selection committees over five decades

Unlike political parties in many other countries, Swedish ones have not adopted more inclusive methods for choosing their election candidates and party leaders. While the party congress formally selects important party offices, the process is managed, prior to the formal vote, by a selection committee vested with the task of filtering the pool of potential leaders and proposing one of them as the new leader. In this article, we survey the composition of these selection committees over time to investigate the extent to which change has taken place. Specifically, we investigate whether the composition of these powerful committees, which decide who joins the ranks of the country’s political leaders, has developed over time in relation to what prominent theories of intra-party power might lead us to expect. We derive testable expectations from prominent conceptualisations of intra-party power and apply these empirically. Specifically, we study the composition of party selection committees in Sweden over 50 years, 1969–2019. In total, this includes 40 different selection committees and almost 400 individuals. Contrary to conventional wisdom on intra-party power relations, the empirical analysis reveals a surprising degree of stability, raising questions about common claims of general power shifts within parties.

Posters, Politics and Power: Mediated Materialisation of Public Authority in Bangladesh Party Politics

Party-political posters, banners and hoardings mark the everyday urban landscape of Bangladesh. They have become pervasive visual and material expressions of everyday politics in an environment where ‘visibility means everything’. This article seeks to understand local politics and power dynamics in Bangladesh through party-political posters while suggesting that the symbolism and material permanence of these posters may be considered efficacious elements in a wider network of party politics. Political posters in Bangladesh are more than mere conveyors of political messages for electoral victory. Instead, they are essential ‘to the composition, maintenance, and assemblage’ of inter- and intra-party politics. Political posters emerged as an important device in the socio-material conceptualisation of power, political performance and space in local politics in Bangladesh; it is through these posters that inter-party rivalries over space and authority are mediated and how intra-party power relations become structured.

The ‘genetic’ effect: Can parties’ past organizational choices condition the development of their internal distribution of power in the cartel party era? Evidence from Finland, 1983–2017

This study critically assesses the claim of the cartel party theory that the party in central office (PCO) has lost its powers to the party in public office (PPO) as parties have adapted to various changes in their operating ‘environment’. The study argues that a party’s tendency to adapt is conditioned by the party’s ‘genetic’ heritage: if the PCO assumed a prominent position during the party’s institutionalization, it can more likely stand against external pressures compared to a PCO that has been traditionally weak. The study compares the development (1983–2017) of two Finnish parties, which hail from polar ‘genetic’ traditions: a social democratic mass party and a conservative cadre party. The change of the party ‘environment’ has strongly supported PCO’s decay. Unlike earlier longitudinal studies on intra-party power balance, the study assesses all significant power dimensions and finds a contradictory development: while the distribution of leadership positions and resources increasingly favour the PPO in both parties, significant ‘genetic’ differences in the distribution of formal decision-making power have not diminished at all. If statutory regulations matter, the results suggest that the PPO cannot ‘insulate’ like the cartel model expects in parties where the PCO’s strong role has been strictly codified.

Power Sharing, Mobilization, and Party Organization

We study the internal organization of political parties as the solution of a moral hazard problem between a party principal (or selectorate) and two factions. Factional mobilization effort bolsters a party’s electoral chances but can only be imperfectly monitored—via an internal contest. We model a party’s internal organization as a system of “prizes,” an al- location of resources between winner and loser of the internal contest. We show that when (i) a party’s baseline electoral strength is low and (ii) electoral outcomes are not too responsive to mobilization efforts, there is an inverse relationship between inter-party power sharing and intra-party power sharing: institutional settings that award more resources and policy influence to election winners should produce party structures that promote a more egalitarian allocation of power across factions. Our results help organize the empirically documented dispersion in party organizational structures.

The Contributions of Chief Obafemi Awolowo to the Growth and the Development of Nigeria During First Republic

This study examines the personality of Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the making of Nigerian nation in the First Republic. The study found out that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was a Nigerian nationalist and statesman who played a significant role in Nigeria’s independence movement during First and Second Republics. The study notes that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was thrice a major contender for Nigeria’s highest office. He was a key player in the intra-party power tussle that erupted in 1962 that led to disturbances in Western Region House of Assembly. Also, the study examines major challenges faced by Chief Obafemi Awolowo and how he eventually became the Federal Commissioner of Finance and the Vice Chairman of the Federal Executive Council in 1966. The study employs primary and secondary source materials including books, journal articles and other scholarly publications to interrogate the study. It concludes that Awolowo was responsible for much of the progressive social legislation that made Nigeria a modern nation today.

The Women’s Equality Party: Emergence, Organisation and Challenges

Women’s political parties are designed to increase women’s representation in politics. More than 30 have been established in Europe since 1987, yet there has been little systematic analysis of why and when they emerge, how they organise and what challenges they face. We argue that the study of women’s parties can offer insights into questions concerning inter and intra-party power relations and the relationship between social movements and political parties, while also contributing to broader debates around the ‘big questions’ of representation, gender (in)equality, and the dynamics of political inclusion and exclusion. This article explores these issues through a case study analysis of the UK’s Women’s Equality Party. Drawing upon original empirical research undertaken with party activists and officials, we argue that the party’s impact has been constrained by wider organisational logics and an unequal party system, while it has so far adhered to traditional (male-dominated) patterns of party organisation.

Fighting for a name on the ballot: constituency-level analysis of nomination violence in Zambia

ABSTRACTWhat factors increase the likelihood of nomination violence? Nomination violence can be an expression of both horizontal conflict, between local political elites, and vertical conflict, between national and local elites. We theorize about factors that may increase the risks of vertical and horizontal conflict and leverage a unique dataset of constituency-level nomination violence obtained from surveys with 464 domestic election observers active in the 2016 Zambian general election. Our statistical analyses show constituencies with an incumbent standing for re-election were more likely to experience nomination violence. Also, contrary to previous research on general election violence, we theorize and find that more rural constituencies had a higher propensity for nomination violence than urban constituencies. Our findings highlight the importance of intra-party power relations and the bargaining relationship between the centre and periphery.

Managed intra-party democracy

The question of how party leaders are selected has recently, and belatedly, come under systematic comparative scrutiny. If it is the location of intra-party power that interests us, however, it might be that some of the more observable indicators in such processes, such as the identity of the selectorate, are not actually the most revealing ones. Using a delegation perspective, we thus present a framework for analysing prior steps in leader selection and relate it to various ideal-typical constellations of intra-party power. The framework encompasses, first, what we call precursory delegation, with focus especially on an agent that, formally or informally, manages the selection process before it reaches the selectorate. Second, the framework takes account of the degree to which the process is managed rather than left open to free competition between leader candidates. We illustrate the framework primarily with instances of leader selection in two Swedish parties.

Tavits, Margit. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization (review)

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 580 people believed, others colluded, and still others resisted, but this is true, he argues, of ‘any power regime’. In order to understand the specificities of state socialism, it is necessary to explore ‘people’s various interactions, and their unexpected, surprising, and often contradictory outcomes, unfolding within the various social contexts organized, accepted, or even encouraged by the regime itself’ (p. 248). The strongest chapters in this collection take up Poenaru’s challenge to resist dichotomy. Socialist Escapes is a very welcome addition to a growing literature on tourism, leisure and the pleasures and challenges of daily life under Communism. Department of History Anne E. Gorsuch University of British Columbia Tavits, Margit. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2013. viii + 289 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £19.99: $32.99 (paperback). Scholars of party politics in Central and Eastern Europe have tended to downplay the importance of party organization. Members and an extensive network of party branches seemed so passé, so twentieth-century. Not only did notable authorities such as Attila Ágh, Petr Kopecký, Paul Lewis, Peter Mair and Ingrid van Biezen argue that new parties in the region were unlikely to build organizational structures, but they tapped into the conventional wisdom that parties in the new democracies did not need them. In her pioneering and path-breaking study Margit Tavits argues cogently against this view, showing that strong party organization really does matter for party success, longevity and durability. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization focuses on three components of party organization: organizational extensiveness (i.e. the number of local branches), membership size and activism and the professionalization of the central organization (i.e. the size of the central-office paid staff). Tavits employs a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods to great effect: there is hard core number-crunching using some sophisticated statistical approaches, but this is combined with detailed studies of parties in the four countries at the heart of her study: Estonia, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. By looking in detail at the contrasting fortunes of parties through paired comparisons and narratives, she shows that organizational strength enhances parties’ chances of electoral success and survival. She not only highlights the relationship, but seeks to tease out the mechanisms which make this happen. Tavits points out that if a member of parliament belongs to a party with a strong organization not only can he/she rely on the party’s REVIEWS 581 reputation and resources to get reelected, but also the stronger the party the more ‘credible and effective is its threat to withdraw the electoral benefits (i.e. expel or demote the legislator) if a legislator undermines party unity’ (p. 10). Tavits takes the study of party organization one step further by then asking, given the positive effects of party organizational strength, why do only some parties build strong organizations? She notes that ‘[p]arty leaders face a nontrivial dilemma: by strengthening their party organization on the ground in different electoral districts, they potentially improve its electability, and possible survival chances. However, they simultaneously risk losing intraparty power to the organizationally strong subunits’ (p. 151). Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization is an outstanding book, but two criticisms deserve to be levelled. Tavits is making a case for the importance of party organization across Central and Eastern Europe, but are her four cases the best to explore the hypotheses and illustrate the arguments? A case could be made that Bulgaria might have been worth looking at because of the striking variation between one side of the spectrum dominated by one party since 1989 and the other side which has shown significant churn. Equally, the case of Slovakia illustrates that even with well-developed party organizations some parties like the Communist-successor Party of the Democratic Left and Mečiar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia have perished. In neither case does Tavits’s distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ leadership style help explain the life-cycles of these parties, although to be fair, her overall stress on the role of agency does seem to hold the key to the fate of these...

Designing candidate selection methods: Exploring diversity in Australian political parties

The processes political parties use to select their candidates for public office constitute a crucial element of political recruitment in representative democracies and provide important insights into how power is distributed within party organisations. In this article, we develop a typology for understanding the diversity of preselection mechanisms in Australia's major parties that is based on degrees of influence between the central and local components of the party organisation. The typology in turn reflects preselection rules as public expressions of intra-party power sharing arrangements. We also identify the institutional, strategic and normative factors (including electoral systems, the accommodation of intra-party groups, candidate quality, efficiency and social norms) that influence the choices parties have to make when selecting and implementing a particular system.政党用以选举候选人出任公职的过程构成了代议制民主国家政治遴选的一个关键因素，并提供了理解政党组织内权力分配的一个重要角度。本文根据中央和地方党组织之间影响的不同程度，提出了一种分类法以理解澳大利亚主要政党预选机制的多样性。这种分类法本身反映了作为表达政党内权力分享安排的预选规则。我们还找到了体制、战略以及规范性因素（包括选举制度、党内不同群体的相互适应、候选人品质、效率、社会规范等等），这些因素会影响政党选择和实施某种制度时的决策。

‘Marx’ or the Market? Intra-party Power and Social Democratic Welfare State Retrenchment

Differences in the intra-party balance of power explain variation in social democratic responses to the economic crisis of the late 1970s. This article evidences this claim by analysing the case of welfare state retrenchment by social democratic parties. Welfare state retrenchment is electorally risky for social democrats and often contrary to their principles. Therefore cases of welfare state retrenchment by social democrats provide an excellent case study of the difficult trade-offs parties have to make between office, policy and vote pay-offs. The article claims that leadership-dominated parties advance office-seeking strategies and are therefore responsive to economic conditions and public opinion. Conversely, activist-dominated parties advance policy-seeking strategies and therefore support traditional social democratic policy platforms or seek more radical solutions. By comparing seven social democratic parties (Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK) between 1980 and 2005, this article explains variation in when social democrats introduced welfare state retrenchment.

Changes in Likud Party organization as an outcome of electoral victory in 1988 and electoral defeat in 1992: an Israeli case study

This study examines the effect of electoral victory in 1988 and electoral defeat in 1992 on the party organization structure of Israel's Likud Party. Until recently, most researchers on party organization claimed that electoral defeat causes organizational change, while other scholars found that victory, too, can generate change in party organization. The present article studies the effects of electoral defeat versus electoral victory on party organization. Findings reveal that, following victory, the Likud became more factional, with intra-party power struggles, leading to a more equal distribution of power. Electoral defeat changed the dominant coalition and leadership, resulting in a more oligarchic structure.

How intra-party power relations affect the coalition behaviour of political parties

This article examines the impact of intra-party politics on the coalition behaviour of political parties. The policy-seeking model of party behaviour is refined by differentiating between policy purity and policy influence, arguing that the distribution of power within political parties affects how inclined they are to abandon policy ideals to participate in coalitions and thereby gain influence on policy. Three contradictory hypotheses are tested in a multivariate analysis based on the legislative coalition behaviour of 11 Danish parties from 1953 to 2004. The analysis shows that, among parties close to the government in policy terms, those dominated by the parliamentary party group more frequently enter binding legislative coalitions than do parties dominated by their national party organization. This implies that the ability of parties to convert parliamentary representation into actual influence on parliamentary decisions is conditioned by their internal distribution of power.

How European Integration Changes National Parties: Evidence from a 15-Country Study

This article examines the impact of European integration on the balance of power within national political parties. It does this by drawing on the results of a survey of key actors in up to 55 parties in the 15 pre-2004 enlargement member states. The analyses show that, when they are involved in EU-level decision-making, party elites are relatively powerful vis-à-vis their national parties and that in a number of instances their intra-party power has also increased over time. National parties have, to some extent, attempted to constrain their elites but appear to be fighting a losing battle. Although there are some minor differences by country and by party, the empowerment of party elites is a general phenomenon. This research provides an empirical dimension to the existing research on the Europeanisation of national political parties and presents an important substantiation of the widely discussed democratic deficit that exists within the EU system of governance.

Political Reform in Japan: Leadership Looming Large (review)

Reviewed by: Political Reform in Japan: Leadership Looming Large Tomohito Shinoda (bio) Political Reform in Japan: Leadership Looming Large. By Alisa Gaunder. Routledge, London, 2007. xiii, 178 pages. $125.00. Does political leadership matter in Japan? Karel van Wolferen, in his bestselling The Enigma of Japanese Power (Knopf, 1989) provides a negative answer to this question. He describes Japan as a country with an elite system and a submissive middle class. “The System”—elites in the political, bureaucratic, and business worlds—somehow makes decisions as one unit. This system does not have or need political leadership. Even before van Wolferen’s book, the most popular explanation of the Japanese policymaking process was the power elite model. This model characteristically featured three actors: bureaucrats, politicians, and interest groups. Although supporters of this view markedly disagreed on the balance of power among those groups, bureaucrats were often described as pivotal. With a strong bureaucracy, the role of the prime minister was limited. The Japanese prime minister faces strong constraints that come from the decentralized nature of the political system. Two dimensions of friction between the government and the ruling party are issue-specific sectionalism that is policy oriented and factionalism that involves intraparty power struggles. My view is that prime ministers have played very important roles in major policy decisions by effectively utilizing their resources—such as connections within their own parties as well as with other parties and the bureaucracy, appointment powers, and media and public support—and that political leadership indeed matters. The prime ministership of Koizumi Jun’ichirō supports this view, and many studies have been published to describe his leadership. Most of those studies stress differences between his leadership and that of his predecessors. I welcome Alisa Gaunder as a new scholar in this school of thought, one who believes that political leadership mattered even before Koizumi. Gaunder presents an interesting and useful framework of analysis to evaluate leadership in political reform since the 1970s. In addition to political [End Page 536] resources, she introduces three elements that are important to achieving policy goals: risk taking, vision, and commitment. In her conclusion, Gaunder argues that these three personal attributes made the difference in the outcome. On one hand, Miki Takeo and Ozawa Ichirō were successful leaders with clear visions of reform who were willing to take risks to pursue their ideas. On the other hand, Kaifu Toshiki and Miyazawa Kiichi did not have these personal attributes and failed in their reform efforts. Her main argument is well supported with background information on the leaders’ vision and commitment. However, I have difficulty accepting the author’s evaluation of the amount of political resources the political leaders had. Qualitative analyses such as this study cannot escape being arbitrary and subjective. But Gaunder basically recognizes only two levels of political resources, high and low. Kōno Yōhei is the only leader perceived to have had a low level of resources, while five others (Kaifu, Koizumi, Miki, Miyazawa, and Ozawa) are identified with high levels. Kōno was a junior member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and later leader of the New Liberal Club, and therefore it is self-evident that he had fewer resources than the others who represented the views of a majority of the Lower House. Including Kōno allows the author to find two levels of resources among political reform leaders; the other five all fall into the same category. But I wonder if adding Kōno is appropriate. I further question whether Kaifu Toshiki should be included with Koizumi in the category of politically resourceful leaders. My earlier work on this topic is cited to describe the significant informal powers that come with the post of prime minister, which Kaifu assumed. It is true that public support of the Kaifu cabinet was relatively high, especially compared with his immediate predecessors, Takeshita Noboru and Uno Sōsuke, who suffered from political and personal scandals. But Kaifu lacked other important sources of informal power introduced in my study. His professional reputation was probably the lowest among the LDP prime ministers. His power base within the LDP was weak, and his ties with the bureaucracy, the opposition parties...