Local Party Leaders Research Articles

Intimate Connections: Political Interests and Group Activity in State and Local Parties

Using data from the 1988 Party Elite Study, this paper tests two different models of how interests and parties are related among a national sample of state and local party leaders and activists. Two models of interest intermediation are compared: the pluralist model stressing consensus and bipartisanship, and the party government model stressing conflict and partisanship. New research is reviewed suggesting that political interests have become nationalized and work within the parties. Using Stinchcombe’s "crucial experiment," opposing assumptions of the two models are compared. While we do not test whether interests and parties are equally strong, we do find that strong parties and strong interests share a complementary, even intimate relationship. Strong support is found for the pervasiveness of interests among party elites, the presence of distinct party-linked ideological differences between group members and non-members, linkage between interest membership and organized party factions, group structuring of political information and communication, and a group consciousness. Based on these findings, we find support for the advent of true factions in the contemporary party system, and the conflict model of partisan intermediation in the post-reform party system is confirmed. The fact that interests are so strongly intertwined with the state and local parties provides disconfirmation of the pervasive myth that strong interests lead to decline at the grassroots.

Seeking and sharing office in hung English local councils

The 1980s and early 1990s have seen a rise in the number of local councils where no single party has an overall majority. Inevitably, such a situation means that local political parties have to develop ways of working together. Previous studies have suggested that parties in hung councils prefer to form minority administrations and negotiate ‘ad hoc’ policy deals, generally refusing to share office in the form of committee chairs. However, there is evidence that the pattern is changing, and that local party leaders are recognizing the importance of holding office to achieving policy objectives. The article gives an idea of the problems that Great Britain would face given a hung Parliament.

Coalition Politics At the Regional Level and Center- Periphery Relationships

The study focuses on two questions. One is the degree of autonomy of local party leaders in Italy in selecting coalition partners in local executives. The second and related problem is to clarify the role of local politics and coalitions in the general strategy of Italian political parties. The study was conducted through the analysis of interparty negotiations both at the center and the periphery that followed the 1980 administrative elections. It shows that the politics of coalition formation at the local, especially regional, level is highly centralized, although the forms and degree of centralization vary from party to party and in the various phases of the negotiation process.

Local Party Leaders in Poland

The composition of local elites and the recruitment methods that produced them help clarify the way a political system performs. Using data from six medium-sized Polish towns and two provinces gathered in the late 1970s, this article looks at the composition of local Polish United Workers party authorities and considers whether and to what degree party members differ in education, experience, and work models from other local leaders. The ways in which local power elites responded in the late 1970s to the technocratic goals set by central authorities made them targets of criticism, and help to explain the sweeping personnel changes that ensued after August 1980.

University Enrolment in the People's Republic of China, 1977‐1981: the examination model returns

On October 21st 1977, a year after the death of Mao Zedong and the arrest of the radical Gang of Four', the Chinese Ministry of Education announced a shift in basic educational policy which was to reverberate throughout Chinese society and which today remains both a powerful force and a controversial issue in China. Beginning with the class entering colleges and universities in early 1978, the Ministry announced that students would be enrolled in tertiary institutions based on scores from a series of annual, competitive entrance examinations to be taken by university applicants each summer. For the first time since 1965, admissions to Chinese colleges and universities would be based wholly on academic, rather than political, criteria. The announcement by the Ministry of Education was a development of major importance, affecting not only the Chinese educational system, but also the changing relationship of education to politics in the world's most populous nation, and the shifting family and social background of students attending Chinese tertiary institutions. This report, based upon extensive field research conducted in the People's Republic of China in 1980 and 1981, describes the system of university entrance examinations re-instituted in 1977 and the process of university enrolment in the post-Mao period, and analyses the effects which these new admissions policies have had on the social background distribution of Chinese university students, the changing patterns of authority held by Chinese academic institutions and governmental bodies over educational administration and the enrolment process, and the effects of the enrolment process on the admission of women to tertiary institutions. The circular issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education in late October of 1977 marked an end to the university enrolment process of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, when students were admitted to tertiary education only after at least two years of factory or agricultural labour following secondary school. During the Cultural Revolution, enrolment was based on the recommendations of local Party leaders, workers, and peasants, and the criteria for admission to tertiary curricula stressed the candidates' political commitment and labour record rather than academic achievement [1]. The shifts of late 1977 marked a return to enrolment policies which had been in effect in the first seventeen years of Communist government from 1949 to 1966, prior to the Cultural Revolution. Most importantly, the shifts signified a sharp turn in Chinese education policy, a retreat from the egalitarian emphasis on political training, practical work experience, and popularisation of educational programmes which had been a symbol of the Cultural Revolution. The re

The Governable City: Islands of Power & Political Parties in London

V.O. Key and a host of American political scientists have argued that competing party organizations contribute to responsible political leadership. Absent responsible parties, control fragments and interest group organizations and bureaucrats exercise power, each in a policy-area island, without accountability to the public. Kantor summarizes the argument, then explores the British experience of disciplined local party programs in the context of responsible national parties, to find a surprising willingness of local party leaders to devolve decisions to experts and specialized participants in a highly controversial policy area (education). Local politicians work with a decentralized, functionally specialized power structure, while the national political level provides that elegant centralization which has so attracted American observers. Kantor cautions against "exaggerated faith in a rebuilt party system as the shortest route to more effective city political leadership." Paradoxically, its dependancy on disciplined partisan national politics works toward fragmentation of local politics.

The Qualifications of Local Party and Government Leaders in the Soviet Union and the Development of Pluralism

Resume/AbstractEst-ce vrai que dans l’union sovietique, sous l’influence de l’industrialisation, la nature des chefs politiques et du systeme de leur selection est en train d’etre transformee d’une forme totalitaire a l’une du pluralisme? En autres mots, d’apres Frederic Fleron, si l’on accepte que I’URSS s’est changee de la monocratie, est-elle donc “adaptable-monocratique,” “cooptative,” ou bien “pluraliste”? Fleron lui-meme a trouve qu’il y a, au niveau le plus eleve, un mouvement vers la cooptation. Pour juger si ce meme phenomene a lieu au niveau intermediaire, on peut comparer les qualites techniques et politiques des chefs locales, en utilisant les donnees agregees et biographiques. On decouvert que les secretaires du parti communiste, meme qu’ils posseent les qualites surtout politiques, ont ete transformes par l’acquisition de l’education technique. Aussi, ils sont devenus chefs par cooptation. De la meme facon, les chefs des soviets (conseils) locales ont ete cooptes aux postes dirigeants au lie...

Goals and Activities of Party Officials in a Suburban Community

RADITIONALLY, the office-winning function of the party has been viewed as paramount within the American party system. Indeed, as Frank J. Sorauf states, Much more than other democratic parties, those of the United States are essentially electing organizations.'I It is generally assumed that the electoral preoccupation of American parties is reinforced by the decentralization. Control is often in the hands of local party leaders who are unresponsive to directives from national or even state party organizations. And since the local party organization is believed to be dominated by an incentive system which is based upon tangible political pay-offs, the electoral preoccupation of the parties continues undiminished.2

Local Party Leaders: Groups of Like Minded Men

Local Party Leaders: Groups of Like Minded Men

The Judicial System of the Nazi Party

The Origin of Party Courts. When Hitler reëstablished the NSDAP organization in the spring of 1925, he built it up rather systematically, with several divisions to which separate tasks were assigned. The SA were the “troops,” intended for protection and order (as the Nazis saw it). The office of the Reichsschatzmeister was the finance division of the party, and the Organization Department had the job implied in its name. The Investigation and Adjustment Committees (Untersuchungs- und Schlichtungsausschüsse), briefly called USCHLA, finally, were the beginning of a now elaborate judicial system within the party, consisting of a hierarchy of local and district courts and a supreme court. As the party membership increased rapidly and the problem of its internal consolidation became pressing, the work of the USCHLA piled up. At first, the USCHLA was a rather loose organization, its members working as trusted representatives, so to speak, of the local and district party leaders each of whom had three on his staff. Their judicial competence and procedure was established for the first time in a set of Directions (Richtlinien) decreed by Hitler in August, 1929. After 1933, the Führer ordered the present Chief Party Justice, Walter Buch, to change the USCHLA into a regular party judicial system. New and amplified Directions were consequently decreed on February 2, 1934, defining the respective competences of the state and party courts, and assigning to the latter all matters affecting the party organization.