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COMPARATIVE POLITICS
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the Department of Political Science, University of Houston.
ANIKA GAUJA
1
3
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Acknowledgements
Party reform has a been a subject that has interested me, in one way or
another, for almost a decade now. As such, this book is the product of
many papers, workshops, conferences, and conversations that have shaped
my thinking and ideas over time. A Discovery Early Career Researcher
Award (2013–15) from the Australian Research Council (ARC) provided
funding that enabled me to undertake the empirical research for this project
and the time to bring it all together. I am extremely grateful to the ARC and
the colleagues who supported me in this project. In particular, I would like to
thank those who have inspired my own work, and who have generously
commented on various drafts or engaged with my ideas on reform: Nicole
Bolleyer, Ken Carty, Bill Cross, Florence Faucher, Emilie van Haute, Stewart
Jackson, Dick Katz, Karina Kosiara-Pedersen, Susan Scarrow, and Ariadne
Vromen. Thanks also to Adele Webb, Michael Vaughan, Liam Hogan, Alice
Judell, and Tom Harrison for their invaluable research assistance. Research
such as this is not possible without the cooperation of many party members,
officials, and parliamentarians, and I thank everyone who agreed to be
involved in the research (both formally and informally) for their generosity
and time.
This book is dedicated to my nephews, little Cliffy and Guy, as the foun-
dation of their party education . . . when they are old enough to read it!
Contents
List of Tables ix
List of Abbreviations xi
1. Introduction 1
2. Analysing Party Reform 6
References 189
Index 203
List of Tables
Introduction
Taking the podium for his first public address as the newly elected National
Secretary of the Australian Labor Party, parliamentarian Mark Butler called
upon delegates to the 2015 National Conference to finally ‘grasp the nettle’,
and to undertake ‘real party reform’. Dismissing the view that reform was
simply an exercise in navel gazing and a ‘distraction against winning elec-
tions’, Butler argued that changes to the party organization were needed to
‘repay the hard work of party members with real trust and more power’, and
that it was ‘about time Conference listened to the clamour’ (Butler 2015). As
the television cameras closed in on the party leader and his deputy sitting in
the front row, the auditorium filled with applause as conference delegates and
observers welcomed the call to arms.
Two years earlier, and half a world away, Ray Collins stood addressing the
2013 UK Labour Party conference in Brighton to put the case for internal
party reform. Selling a reform package that would fundamentally alter the
relationship between the party and its trade union affiliates, Collins—a former
general secretary of the party and a life peer—passionately argued the ‘need to
change the party so that we are in a better position to change the country’.
While Collins acknowledged that some in the party were ‘nervous about
change’, he suggested that they should not be afraid of it, and that ‘broaden-
ing and deepening the party’s relationship with ordinary people across the
country’ was the primary means of achieving it (Collins 2013a). Delegates
politely applauded when Collins completed his speech, but it was the unionist
who spoke next, pleading that ‘years of history should not be thrown away for
an electoral gimmick’, who received a standing ovation from the crowd.
Regular observers of political party conferences would be familiar with
debates of this kind. Conferences, as the highest formal decision-making
bodies of many political parties, are the natural arenas for internal reform
debates. Nevertheless, to describe these two reform initiatives as purely
internal matters would be to underplay the public quality of the announce-
ments and the substantial, outward-facing campaigns that accompanied
them. For example, Butler’s call for reform within the Australian Labor
Party (ALP) was accompanied by an opinion piece in the national Australian
newspaper, and a petition from more than 1,000 party members.1 Collins’
trade union reform campaign began with a public address by former party
2 Party Reform
leader Ed Miliband at the St Bride Foundation in London, in which he
proclaimed ‘I want to build a better Labour Party’, and argued that: ‘We
will do so by shaping a Party appropriate for the twenty-first century, not the
twentieth century in which we were founded. Understanding we live in a
world where individuals rightly demand a voice. Where parties need to
reach out far beyond their membership’ (Miliband 2013). In the months
that followed, the highly stylized interim and final Collins Review reports
were covered in major British press outlets, including the Times, the Tele-
graph, the Guardian, and the Independent newspapers.2 The campaign ended
at a specially convened conference of the Labour Party one year later, in
which delegates voted overwhelmingly to approve the reforms that removed
the electoral college for the selection of the Labour leader and replaced it with
a one-member, one-vote system—which included registered supporters and
union affiliates. In September 2015, under these new rules and amidst much
controversy and allegations of ‘entryism’ (supporters registering simply to
sway the contest), Jeremy Corbyn was elected as the new leader of the UK
Labour Party.
How political parties, as organizations, change over time is certainly not a new
topic of academic inquiry. On the contrary, it has concerned party scholars
working across many different subfields of political science (for example,
comparative politics, political institutions, political and organizational soci-
ology) for more than a century. In one of the earliest and most well-known
examples of work on the causes and consequences of party organizational
change, Robert Michels argued that the development of organizational
complexity necessarily resulted in the creation of hierarchy (1915). Models
of party organization such as the mass, catch-all, electoral professional
and cartel party types, which have had a major impact on the trajectory of
comparative party research (Duverger 1954; Kirchheimer 1966; Panebianco
1988; Katz and Mair 1995, 2009), also originated from a concern with
organizational change and adaptation.
While Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’ still resonates today, the debate
concerning party change has broadened significantly over the years. Real-
world developments such as technological advances and the changing nature
of social relations have been crucially important in driving the need for
theoretical and explanatory advances. In 1997, the organizers of a workshop
at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions
Introduction 3
and a resulting special issue of the journal, Party Politics, cited the fact that
‘after a few decades observing some parties “decline” and then “renew”, it was
perhaps natural that more attention would be focused on how they got from
there to here’ (Harmel and Svasand 1997: 291). The key questions these
scholars identified as important in this research agenda were: What roles do
internal and environmental factors play in party change? How likely is change
to occur (that is, is it inevitable, probable, or random)? Is it reactive or
proactive? Is change gradual or abrupt? And who are the relevant actors in
the process of party change? While more researchers are addressing these
questions, and providing more and more answers, as Chapter 2 will argue, the
scholarship suffers from a lack of integration of different perspectives and
methods.
Almost two decades on from the publication of the special issue of Party
Politics, the context within which organizational change is experienced (or
practised) by parties and studied by scholars has itself altered quite signifi-
cantly. Perhaps the greatest concern that overshadows studies of party organ-
ization today is the collapse of formal party membership. For parties such as
the German Social Democrats, the halving of membership since the 1990s has
created what has been described as ‘beyond catastrophic circumstances’,
which mean that ‘party reform is today more urgent than ever’ (Totz 2011;
see also Spier and Klein 2015: 89–92). The decline in party membership has
been well documented in previous research (Scarrow 2015; van Haute and
Gauja 2015; van Biezen et al. 2012; Whiteley 2011; Scarrow and Gezgor
2010), but it impacts upon how we might think about party organizational
change in a number of important ways.
The first is the sheer pervasiveness of membership decline, which has been
shown to affect parties both across democracies and across party families.
Rather than being a specific ‘problem’ faced by only some parties, it is now
part of a broader fight for institutional survival.3 This highlights not only the
salience of the trend, but also the complexity of the problem as encompassing
social changes that transcend states and parties with different ideological
standpoints and organizational histories. As the Social Democratic Party
(SPD) in Germany noted when it embarked on its organizational reform
programme in 2009, new political ‘citizens have become more self-assured;
they no longer wish to simply be “plugged” into an organization. They are
demanding opportunities for political participation’ (SPD 2011: 1).
Another aspect of this pervasiveness is the extent to which membership
decline impacts upon key party functions. Members have traditionally been
seen as a committed group of activists that promulgate a party ideology, a
source of outreach and policy innovation and as the provider of financial and
campaigning resources (Scarrow 1996: 42–6; Ware 1996: 63–4). Insofar as
dwindling party memberships affect the performance of parties’ participatory
and representative functions, they also raise broader questions about the
4 Party Reform
continued capacity of parties to enhance the quality of democracy (see, for
example, van Biezen 2014: 178). Perhaps the most important role that party
members have played is in creating a sense of democratic legitimacy for a
political party. Although many are increasingly questioning the ‘golden age’
of the mass party and now regard it as a historical episode (see, for example,
van Biezen and Poguntke 2014: 205), it still carries significant weight as a
normative model of how political parties should be organized—evident in the
common legal requirement that political parties must be established as mem-
bership organizations (Gauja 2015a).
The phenomenon of ‘party decline’ is, however, cyclical. Whilst member-
ship crises might seem acute at the time of writing, Harmel and Janda (1994:
260) note that much of the literature on the decline of party systems in the
1980s was stimulated by the ‘real or perceived “decline” of political parties in
industrialized societies’ and the expectation that other political organizations,
such as interest groups, might one day replace them.4 If we accept that fears of
party decline come and then go, then come again, the timing of this book is
predictable. However, the focus is not so much on whether political parties are
in decline—it is on how they perceive this tenuous position, and how this, in
turn, influences what they do about it.
As a book dedicated to the topic of what motivates political parties to
undertake organizational reforms, and how they go about this process, the
arguments developed within speak to the debate on party decline in several
ways. It is important to note at the outset that the book does not present a
longitudinal analysis stretching back decades, but rather a more contempor-
ary examination. The last ten years of party organizational reform in a
handful of established democracies is analysed: Australia, the United King-
dom, Canada, Germany, and New Zealand. Readers will therefore need to
form their own judgements on how similar reform debates of the present day
are to those undertaken in the past, and whether the events and motivations
described here resonate in their own party systems. The primary concern of
the research is in establishing how parties’ perceptions of the social trends in
which they operate shape reform agendas, and how this relates to competitive
demands and pressures from within the party for organizational change.
A fundamental question that this book grapples with is whether, in a climate
of membership decline, party reforms are designed to reinvigorate the nor-
mative ideal of the mass party model of representation, or whether the
breakdown of membership (coupled with social change) has created a climate
conducive to reforms that might fundamentally alter the way in which parties
connect citizens and the state. The chapters that follow focus particularly on
four key reform initiatives that begin to blur the traditional boundaries of
party: the introduction of primaries, the changing meaning of party member-
ship, and issues-based online policy development and community organizing
campaigns.
Introduction 5
In addition to the substance of change, the research is equally concerned
with the process of change. As this book will demonstrate, declining party
memberships have had a fundamental effect on the way in which political
parties ‘sell’ organizational reform: as part of a broader rhetoric of democra-
tization, of re-engagement, and of modernization delivered to diverse
audiences—both internal and external to the party. The way in which Ray
Collins spoke of the UK Labour Party as needing to deepen and broaden its
relationship with ‘ordinary people’ provides a nice example of this type of
rhetoric. Reform is therefore conceptualized not only as organizational
change, but also an opportunity for public engagement and rebranding.
Chapter 2 further articulates the concept of ‘party reform’ in the context of
the existing scholarship on party organizational change, outlining the analyt-
ical framework and research design that forms the basis of the book.
NOTES
1. Mark Butler, ‘ALP national conference: Reform should give more say’, Australian,
23 July 2015; see also, Michelle Grattan, ‘Butler will press for ALP reform’,
Conversation, 21 July 2015.
2. Building a One Nation Labour Party Interim Report (released September 2013) and
Building a One Nation Labour Party: The Collins Review into Labour Party Reform
(released February 2014). Press coverage included Patrick Wintour, ‘Ed Miliband
to put Labour union reform to vote at special conference’, Guardian, 23 July 2013;
Andrew Grice, ‘Miliband plans to cut off the hand that fed him with ambitious plan
to rob trade unions of their one-third share of Labour leadership vote’, Independent,
17 January 2014; and Christopher Hope, ‘Labour funding reforms will not
“damage” party’s links with unions, says Lord Collins’, Telegraph, 19 September
2013.
3. However, with the expanding availability of party (rather than aggregate national
level) membership figures over time, new research is suggesting that the effects of
membership decline are not even across all parties, with Green parties—for
example—actually increasing their memberships (Paulis et al. 2015).
4. See, for example, Lawson and Merkl (1988). However, for a more critical view see
Reiter (1989).
2
Each of the three levels provides a different set of incentives for reform. The
political system refers to the arena in which the ‘general norms’ of political
conduct are determined, and the legitimacy of a political party as an electoral
Analysing Party Reform 9
actor is secured. Changes to candidate-selection processes at this level might
be motivated by changes in the nature of democratic expectations and the
balance of power between citizens and elites. Electoral competition is the
primary motivator of reform at the party system level, whereas the contest
between individuals and groups for the distribution of power becomes more
apparent at the intra-party level.
Moving from level to level, the scope and units of analysis shift to reflect a
diverse range of actors and institutions that play a role in the process of party
reform. Inside the party, the basic unit of analysis is the individual politician,
party member, and formal (or informal) intra-party groupings (Barnea and
Rahat 2007: 379). Each of these respective actors is situated within the specific
organizational practices and structures of their party. At the level of the party
system, where the norms of electoral competition dominate, political parties
are viewed as unitary actors, driven by the desire to maximize seats and votes,
and increase their policy relevance. Turning to the level of the political system,
the norms, conventions, and practices that govern political behavior are the
key units of analysis.
The particular drivers for reform at each of these three levels, as well as the
scope and units of analysis, are illustrated in Table 2.1. The first row depicts
the general scope and objects of analysis for each of the three levels. The
second row provides examples of some of the underlying factors that drive
Scope and objects Interactions and Interactions (largely Norms, conventions, and
of analysis relationship premised on the basis existing patterns of
between individuals of competition) democratic practice.
and groups within a between unitary These norms and
particular party parties in a party practices are situated
system within the general
cultural, social, and
political environment
Potential drivers Enacting changes to Enhancing electoral Changes to the norms
for reform the balance of competitiveness, and conventions of
power within a through: ‘good’ democratic
party, through: · remedying failure or practice, through:
· leadership change damage to reputation ·
changes to public
· a party merger or · proactively expectations
split creating advantage ·
legitimacy concerns
· weakening/shifting · contagion effects ·
democratization
factional influence ·
personalization
· increasing
participation
·
‘Americanization’
Source: Adapted from Barnea and Rahat (2007: 378) and Gauja (2012).
10 Party Reform
reform at each level. As the drivers for party reform at each of these three
levels constitute much of the detailed analysis in the first part of the book
(Chapters 3, 4, and 5), only a brief overview is provided here, based on what is
claimed to be important in previous theoretical and empirical studies.
As noted above, previous studies of party change have pointed to the
importance of changes in leadership and the dominant faction as internal
catalysts for reform. Although conceptualized as discrete variables for the
purpose of empirical analysis, these factors can be viewed as a part of a
broader shift in the balance of power within a political party. Changing
power dynamics assist organizational changes for several reasons. From a
rational choice perspective, actors and groups within the party are expected to
act to enhance their power base and weaken those of their internal opponents,
which may involve a change in the rules. From a sociological standpoint, a
change in balance of power might also allow a new group of elites to challenge
the dominant ideology of the party and its philosophical direction, creating
opportunities for organizational changes that reflect new political and
strategic goals. Barnea and Rahat (2007: 378) argue that in addition to
leadership changes, party mergers or splits (as well as ‘power struggles
between challengers and apparatchiks’) are likely to produce organiza-
tional reform. Examining the process of candidate-selection reform in
Australia, Gauja (2012) found that restricting the role of factions (or
collective groupings within the party) and increasing participation provided
significant motivations for party reform (also see further Chapter 3 in this
volume, ‘The Internal Drivers of Party Reform’).
Disaggregating the category of ‘external factors’ into drivers at the level of
the party and political systems advances previous scholarship and provides
valuable insight into the distinction between longer-term forces that osten-
sibly affect all political parties, regardless of their success, and the factors that
motivate political parties to enhance their electoral competitiveness. The
latter is the primary motivator for reform at the level of the party system,
and can stem from an electoral loss or damage to public reputation (Barnea
and Rahat 2007: 378). Gauja (2012) argues, however, that such motivations
need not necessarily be reactionary—they can be motivated by a proactive
desire to create electoral advantage, often copying or emulating the organ-
izational practices of political parties deemed to be successful in other
political contexts.
Perhaps the least theorized and well-understood arena for party change,
motivations at the level of the political system, constrain the direction of
parties’ organizational choices and include ‘long-term social, cultural and
political trends, such as modernization, democratization, and the personal-
ization of politics’ (Barnea and Rahat 2007: 378). As I will argue further
in Chapter 5, changes to the norms and public expectations surrounding
political practice and good governance threaten the legitimacy of all political
Analysing Party Reform 11
parties, irrespective of their electoral strength, and therefore represent some
of the most important and pressing catalysts for organizational reform in
the modern era.
While the discussion thus far has highlighted some of the reasons as to why
political parties (and the diverse range of actors that constitute them) might
contemplate change, relatively little has been said of the process of change—
particularly in the context of the relationship between the three levels
described above. In explaining their framework, Barnea and Rahat (2007:
378) provide some indications of how party reform filters through the various
levels. The general norms and expectations that characterize the political
system constrain both the choice and general direction of the initiated
reforms. For example, in a climate of ‘democratization’—manifest in increas-
ing expectations for inclusive candidate-selection processes—a political party
would presumably be more willing to consider reforming candidate-selection
procedures to enfranchise all individual members rather than assigning this
authority to a party leader. Party system events, such as electoral defeats and
political scandals, influence the timing of reform initiatives more than they
create a decisive factor for change. While a decisive loss at the polls might
prompt a political party to consider change, reform would only eventuate if
backed by a measure of internal will. As Barnea and Rahat (2007: 377)
explain:
Developments at the two ‘upper’ levels (political system and party system)
influence intra-party decision-making by determining the anticipated
costs and benefits of each decisions for the party as a whole. But at the
end of the day decisions are taken internally, with a certain level of
autonomy for the decision-makers.
Political System
Level
Party System
Level
Party Level
F I G U R E 2 . 1 The ‘Swiss cheese’ model of party reform
However, the presence of drivers at all three levels would suggest that reform
is not only much more likely, but that its effects will have greater resonance
and be longer lasting.
The relationship between the three levels—intra-party, party system, and
political system—and the way in which motivations in each of these arenas
can come together to produce change, is illustrated in Figure 2.1, the ‘Swiss
cheese’ model of party reform. Originally developed as a model of accident
causation in aviation and health care (Reason 1997), the ‘Swiss cheese’ model
can be applied to other complex and multi-layered systems, such as political
systems, and reinterpreted such that accidents simply become changes or
reforms. In the model, the complexity of the system is represented by individ-
ual slices of cheese (the party, the party system, and the political system). Each
slice creates a barrier to reform by virtue of the operation of norms, conven-
tions, and complex organizational processes that are generally resistant to
change (see, for example, Eldersveld 1998: 326). The holes in each of the slices
represent the drivers and motivating factors listed in Table 2.1, varying in
magnitude or importance. They can be created and/or expanded through
conscious acts or events, or can represent latent conditions. A hole (or
motivation) in any one of these layers can potentially create change but
change will most likely occur when the holes (or motivations) multiply,
increase in magnitude (importance), and momentarily align, thereby creating
a trajectory for reform.
Swiss cheese is a simple metaphor, and the model is a useful heuristic device
for not only explaining why change occurs, but when it is most likely to occur.
It highlights the complexity of change, in particular, the relationship between
different layers of the overall environment and the relationship between
intentional and latent motivations and conditions. It conveys the fact that
Analysing Party Reform 13
no single motivation or driver will be sufficient to produce a successful
reform—rather it involves the conjunction of (often unforeseeable) factors
arising from different levels.
As with the multi-level framework more generally, the ‘Swiss cheese’ meta-
phor might be criticized on the basis that the three levels (or slices) do not exist
independently of each other, but are mutually reinforcing. Another criticism is
that the model does not explain the trajectory of change—that is, how the
holes come to line up. Rather than trying to refute the first of these criticisms,
the complexity of change and the interdependence between the levels is readily
acknowledged throughout the book. However, as previously argued, disag-
gregating the three levels for the purpose of empirical analysis allows us to
better understand this complexity. Addressing the trajectory argument, and
by drawing on insights from a constructive institutionalist approach, I argue
throughout the book that both intra-party actors (such as parliamentarians)
and some actors external to party (for example, think tanks) have signifi-
cant discursive power in shaping their institutional context through ideas
and rhetoric, and in this sense political parties and their constituent
actors—through their reform campaigns—have some ability to create new
holes or increase the size of existing ones. Through this process parties
highlight, or produce alignments between the three levels in ‘selling’ the
message of change.
Having established the potential motivations and drivers behind party reform,
as well as briefly articulating some of the processes that underpin these
changes, the chapter now turns to consider what exactly is meant by party
change—and in particular, how organizational reform (the subject of this
book) can be distinguished from organizational change. Four main contours
of the debate are considered: the speed of the change (is it abrupt or incre-
mental?), the subject of the change (does it alter informal processes or formal
rules?), the substance of the change (could it be classified as major or minor?),
and finally, the genesis of the change (is it intentional or accidental?) A brief
examination of the existing literature reveals that scholars have interpreted
the meaning and scope of party change in quite different ways.
16 Party Reform
The Speed of the Change
A general point of consensus within the literature on party change is that most
organizational changes are ‘incremental and gradual’ (Harmel and Janda
1994: 260). This is, for example, a characteristic of both developmental and
evolutionary models of party change (see Panebianco 1988: 239), regardless of
whether this change is path dependent or whether it stems from changes
in the relative balance of power between strategic actors in the organization.
Gradual party change is emphasized in much of the work on ideal-type
organizational models and the nature of parties as adaptive organizations,
such as the catch-all party (Kirchheimer 1966), the electoral professional party
(Panebianco 1988), and the cartel party (Katz and Mair 1995; 2009). Incremental
change can often accumulate to fundamental transformations (Mahoney and
Thelen 2010: 2). The emphasis on gradual change does not mean that organ-
izational changes that happen rapidly should be excluded from the analysis,
but previous studies do imply that they are far less likely to occur. This
expectation is consistent with the multi-level framework proposed earlier:
while it is entirely possible that changes to a party’s organization may be
made quickly, particularly where they require little support from members
within the party, a confluence of driving forces at the political system, party
system, and intra-party levels will take longer to occur. Furthermore, the percep-
tion of party change as a gradual process reflects the fact that it is often difficult to
discern a clear start and end point for change. Changes, for example, might occur
some time after a catalytic event, they may be additive and incremental, or the
process of change may commence and then stall. The expectation that change is
more likely to be incremental than abrupt, and the mechanics of the processes
behind party change, are explored in greater detail in Chapter 7.
Up to this point in the chapter, I have used the concepts of party change and
party reform interchangeably, which reflects the fact that they have often been
used as synonyms in the party organization literature. However, to do
so obscures the fact that organizational ‘reforms’ and ‘changes’ can involve
Analysing Party Reform 19
substantially different processes of decision making, communication, and
consultation. It is the former, organizational reforms, with which this book
is primarily concerned. As a subset of organizational change, and drawing on
common usage of the term, party reform can be defined as: intentional and
publicized changes that are made to a party’s structures and practices in order to
improve them. The speed with which the reform is implemented can vary
considerably depending on the political system, party system, and intra-
party factors identified above, and is a matter for empirical investigation
rather than theoretical assumption. Reforms can be made to all aspects of
the party organization, from the minutiae of rules concerning the composition
of meetings, to practices surrounding campaigning and membership, to the
implementation of gender quotas. However, the essence of a reform is that it is
driven by the need for improvement and is intentionally publicized, and
therefore it is more likely that reforms will concern major rather than minor
organizational changes.3 Reforms need not necessarily involve formal rule
changes or constitutional amendments, but given the significance of these events,
it might be expected that the majority of reforms would involve rule changes.
This is, however, an expectation that needs to be empirically investigated.
Harmel and Janda (1994; citing Janda 1980) argue that there is ‘a tendency
in the literature to interpret party change as “reform” and to assume that
reforms function as intended—despite reformers’ mixed record of success’.
The multi-level framework developed above does indicate the combination of
conditions in which a reform is more likely to be successful, however, this
study does not assume that reforms will necessarily succeed, nor does it try to
develop a measure of success. Rather, the concept of reform adds to the
discussion of substantive versus symbolic change—in the reform scenario,
the symbolism of the change may be just as important as the substance
(including whether or not the reform initiative actually succeeds in changing
established party practice). As an outcome, reform is captured in deliberate
and often very public changes to parties’ organizational rules and/or processes.
As a process, reform offers the party the opportunity to ‘rebrand’ and publicly
alter its image, to emphasize certain strategic priorities over others, and to alter
relationships of power within the party. In this sense, party reform is also much
more than organizational change—it is equally a process (rather than being
exclusively outcome oriented) and a legitimating or branding activity.
This book aims to make a substantial and original contribution to the schol-
arship on party reform, and more broadly, party change, in four main ways.
20 Party Reform
First, by focusing on party reform as a specific subset of change, the research
engages more fully with the notion of symbolic changes that can have reson-
ance beyond the party. It also develops a framework for understanding
reform not only as a means to an end, but a process that carries significance
as a branding exercise and potentially a creator of new norms and expect-
ations, even if the reforms are not fully implemented, or seen as successful.
Second, in drawing on the constructivist institutionalist approach, the three-
level framework, and by utilizing the Swiss cheese heuristic, the book tries
to develop our understanding of how and when reforms occur by focusing on
actors within political parties as mediating agents. Specific reforms do not
simply occur as a result of internal and external forces, but crucially, how
political parties (or more accurately, the groups and individuals within
them) perceive and interpret these pressures, and the moments at which
they align. Third, acknowledging the fact that the politics of reform are
practised across many different political institutions and organizations,
the book attempts to expand our perspective on the study of parties by
introducing concepts and analytical frameworks from other subdisciplines,
including public policy, interest group studies, and political communica-
tion. Fourth, it examines some of the most contemporary organizational
developments in parties that aim to open up the party and blur the
boundaries between members and non-members, including registered sup-
porters, community organizing, and online strategies for engagement and
participation.
The research is based on a comparative design that attempts to navigate a
path between single-party case studies and analyses that aim to provide more
generalizable accounts of party change. The focus is on the contemporary era:
the decade from 2006 to 2015. Six political parties in Australia and the United
Kingdom form the core of the analysis: the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal
Party of Australia, and the National Party (Australia), and the Conservatives,
the Labour Party, and the Liberal Democrats (United Kingdom). The analysis
of these core parties is complemented by a discussion of the comparative
context, and the work draws extensively on illustrative examples from
four more parties in a further four democracies: the Liberals (Canada), the
Labour Party (New Zealand), the Social Democrats (Germany), and the
Parti Socialiste (France).
The selection of these cases has been driven by both empirical and
theoretical considerations. The two core democracies, Australia and the
United Kingdom, were selected on the basis of most-similar-systems
logic (in terms of political culture, parliamentary system, party systems) and
because of the deep familiarity the author has with these two democracies—an
understanding that is crucial for in-depth, qualitative research. Australia and
the United Kingdom make good comparators because they present similar
problems of party decline and citizen disaffection,4 leading us to expect
Analysing Party Reform 21
that party reform trajectories in both these democracies would follow
similar paths.
Within these two democracies, a total of six established membership parties
are included in the analysis, which cover a variety of different party families
(conservative, social democratic, agrarian, and liberal). This diversity is
important to the design of the project because insofar as party change is
conditioned by ideology and organizational tradition, party family has been
identified in the existing literature as a potentially important variable
(Miragliotta 2015a: 701; Harmel and Janda 1994; Panebianco 1988: 50;
Duverger 1954). Of these six parties, two are established social democratic
parties that have been in existence since the beginning of the twentieth
century—the UK Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party—and two
are established conservative parties: the UK Conservatives and the Liberal
Party of Australia. Together, these four parties have governed in alternation
in their respective democracies for the last century. The Liberal Democrats
(UK) were formed in 1988 by a merger of the Liberal Party and the Social
Democrats, while the National Party—a conservative agrarian party—has
existed in Australian politics since the 1920s. The National Party, also known
as the Nationals, has joined the Australian Liberal Party in coalition for most
of its history. From 2010–15 the Liberal Democrats governed in coalition
with the Conservatives, before facing their worst result at the 2015 General
Election, where they were reduced to just eight members of parliament. The
variation in governing status amongst the six parties also allows for an
examination of the extent to which a party’s legislative position—and also
its corresponding electoral success and failure—might impact upon patterns
of party reform. As previously noted, external shocks such as electoral failure
figure prominently in existing accounts of party organizational change. Each
one of these six parties claims to be a membership organization, though
throughout their histories all have experienced an average decline in mem-
bership numbers.5
To complement the analysis of these six ‘core’ parties, examples are drawn
also from the Liberals in Canada (allowing for a consideration of a party
within a traditional multi-party system, see Harmel et al. 1995; Wauters 2014)
and the social democratic parties in New Zealand, Germany, and France.6
The addition of these social democratic parties allows for a more nuanced
analysis of the impact of party family, in particular, whether the motivations
for and processes of reform in social democratic parties transcend national
boundaries. While each of the political parties examined in the book has a
tradition of being a membership organization, the social democratic parties
stand out in this respect as they were founded on the basis of organizational
democracy and strong links with the union movement. We might therefore
expect the maintenance of intra-party democracy and popular participation
to be particularly important for these parties.
22 Party Reform
Most of the existing studies that deal with similar questions of why and how
political parties undertake organizational reforms tend to be single-party
or single-country case studies (see, for example, Wauters 2014; Bale 2012;
Barnea and Rahat 2007; Eldersveld 1998; Müller 1997). In their seminal
article, Harmel and Janda (1994) produced a detailed theoretical model of
party change, but did not empirically test it in that work. The project on which
the article was based collected data on nineteen parties from four democra-
cies: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Denmark
(Harmel et al. 1995). However, in a subsequent article in which this theory
was tested, only six political parties across the four democracies were actually
analysed, due to the limited availability of data (Harmel et al. 1995: 8). Hence
there appears to be somewhat of a natural limit on the size of empirical studies
of organizational reform. As Bale argues, while there have been several well-
cited theoretical pieces on party change, ‘there have only been limited
attempts to check whether their ideas work in the real world . . . This could
be because the case studies required to conduct those tests are so labour-
intensive and so historical’ (Bale 2012: 3).
The method of selection used in this project is appropriate because the aim
of the research is to provide a better understanding of the range of motivations
for change, and the process by which it is achieved within particular political
parties. The design of the research therefore enables the book to say some-
thing of reform trends across a number of parties, but it does not lose sight of
the ‘cultural, social and historical dimensions of political parties’ (Faucher
2015a: 798), which requires a more detailed analysis of individual political
parties within their particular domestic settings.
The methodology of the study is qualitative, and consists primarily of an
in-depth analysis of party review documents, placed in context through
interviews with party activists and elites, an analysis of websites, blogs, and
social media sites, mainstream media reports, petitions, other internal party
documents and surveys, as well as commentaries and pamphlets published
by advocates of reform. Ethnographic observations also constituted an
invaluable source of data. From 2012–15, I attended six party conferences
in Australia and the United Kingdom, several public events such as policy
meetings and fundraisers, and compiled extensive field notes based on my
observations of debates and speeches, attendance at party member ‘train-
ing sessions’, and my informal conversations with activists, members, and
party staff.
The diversity of methods employed has been driven by the need to triangu-
late various sources of data to provide the most comprehensive picture of
intra-party activity in order to facilitate an analysis of the social processes and
phenomena involved. While this methodology has a long tradition and legacy
in studies of party organization stretching back to the work of Michels (1915),
as Faucher (2015a: 798) argues, ‘mainstream comparative politics, and in
Analysing Party Reform 23
particular the study of political parties, has tended to drift away’ from these
more in-depth qualitative approaches. However, as Gauja and van Haute
(2015: 200–1) suggest, this method of inquiry has the potential to shed new
light on studies of party membership and organization by exploring the
meaning that actors place on membership and partisan participation, as
well as the relationship between party actors and the organizational structures
that encapsulate them.
The book comprises two main sections. The first section, ‘Understanding
the Drivers of Party Reform’ (Chapters 3 to 5), explains why political
parties choose to undertake deliberate and often highly publicized organ-
izational change. Building on the theoretical framework developed in this
chapter, it looks at both the internal and external pressures that drive
change, including adaptations as a result of social, technological, and insti-
tutional developments, but also seeks to move beyond these explanations to
analyse the impact of intra-party politics in creating catalysts for change (for
example, factional dynamics), electoral performance, the impact of citizens’
expectations (or at least parties’ perceptions of them), and the role of conta-
gion and entrepreneurial practices (copying practices from other parties and
organizations).
The second section, ‘Party Reform in Practice’ (Chapters 6 to 8) maps the
types of reforms that political parties typically undertake and the particular
aspect of the organization they seek to address (for example, policy or
candidate/leadership selection). It provides an analysis of when reform
events typically occur (for example, after leadership changes, electoral
losses, etc.) and the process by which reform occurs, focusing particularly
on internal party reviews as a mechanism for building consensus. This
section of the book also identifies the key protagonists of party reforms,
addressing the debate in party scholarship as to the respective roles of
party members and elites in agitating for organizational change, as well
as analysing the role of actors and institutions not often studied in party
organizational scholarship: think tanks, the media, and party ‘statesmen’.
Chapter 9 analyses the consequences of these patterns and processes of
reform, focusing in particular on citizens’ reactions to reform initiatives,
the tensions created in the reform process, how decision making within
parties has changed, and how this in turn impacts upon the representative
and participatory functions that political parties perform in contemporary
societies.
24 Party Reform
NOTES
To look in more detail at the intra-party motivations that underlie reform, this
chapter considers a diverse range of initiatives, but pays particular attention
to one general area: the introduction of primaries for candidate and leadership
selection. Candidate- and leadership-selection methods are a particularly
good case study of the internal motivations and machinations of parties,
because they are ‘high-stakes’ activities that define a party’s characteristics,
form the basis of many power struggles within the party, and determine
the composition of the legislature, the government, and the public face of
a party’s campaign activities (Hazan and Rahat 2010: 6–12; Cross and
Blais 2012: 1–5).
However, as Kenig et al. (2015) argue, with the increasing use of primaries
over the last few decades, the term has become prone to conceptual confusion,
being used by scholars to refer to a wide variety of selection contests. What the
term aims to capture in its most basic usage, and the way in which it is used in
this research, is to denote a selection process that is more open, participatory,
or inclusive than pervious restricted and exclusive selection processes—
specifically a process where either all party members, party supporters, or
voters constitute the selectorate (Kenig et al. 2015: 151–3). In the context of
party reform it is also useful to think of a primary as a ‘relative’ term—one
that captures the spirit of ‘opening up’ the selection (or other intra-party
decision-making) processes: a phrase that is often used in justifying the
change.2 Adopting the classification developed by Kenig et al. (2015), two
‘types’ of primary election are of particular interest in the context of recent
examples of party reform because they fundamentally challenge the trad-
itional notion of candidate and leadership selection as an intra-party activity.
The first is the open primary, the most inclusive method in which all voters
may participate in the process without any prior party affiliation, and the
second is the semi-open primary, in which participants must register
as supporters of the party or sign a declaration of support for the party’s
30 Party Reform
principles. In the political parties under consideration, these are the two
variants referred to when ‘primaries’ are mentioned.
A political party can hope for nothing more than a membership that
wants to be involved at every level in the operations of the party. This is
a deep, genuine and treasured desire of our members. There can be no
better sign of the future health of our party, but we need to make the
changes necessary to harness, rather than frustrate, this vital commit-
ment. (Liberal Party, Canada 2009: 14–15)
Much of the literature on the decline of political parties in recent years has
been concerned with the ‘hollowing out’ of parties as membership organiza-
tions and, consequently, as mechanisms for societal-state linkage. As noted in
the Introduction to this book, previous research has established a marked
decline in both party membership numbers and in levels of intra-party activ-
ism (Scarrow and Gezgor 2010; van Biezen et al. 2012; van Haute and Gauja
2015; Whiteley 2011). While there is a broad consensus on the pervasiveness
and salience of membership decline, scholars disagree as to the consequences
of this decline for the future of parties as linkage organizations, and whether
membership is actually necessary for parties at all. For example, Katz and
Mair’s cartel party thesis (1995; 2009) highlights a changing organizational
dynamic within parties where members become marginalized at the expense
of an increasing dependence on the state. In this view of what parties have
become, sustaining a large membership is more about validating the ‘legit-
imising myth of party democracy rather than remain[ing] true vehicles of
linkage between party elites and society at large’ (van Biezen and Poguntke
2014: 205).
The alternate view is that members continue to remain important to the
party organization in the contemporary era. The value of membership is
usually conceptualized in terms of the core functions that parties perform in
representative democracies: in addition to acting as a source of democratic
legitimacy, they provide a means of linking elites with society through
their ideological and issue-based activism, as a source of outreach and
policy innovation, and one of campaigning and financial support (Scarrow
2015: chapter 5; Scarrow 1996: 42–6; Ware 1996: 63–4). While it is certainly
not surprising, all of the political parties in this study both celebrated
and maintained a commitment to the continued importance and role of
party members in both public discourse and that designed for internal party
consumption.
The Internal Drivers of Party Reform 31
A good example can be drawn from a recent report into reform within
the UK Labour Party, which argued:
Members are the lifeblood of our party. It is essential that the rights that
come with membership are recognised and understood. Party members
play a crucial role in holding their MP to account, selecting their parliamen-
tary candidate, selecting the Leader and Deputy Leader, picking delegates
for annual conference, and much more besides. (Collins 2013b: 10)
Whether one subscribes to the cartel thesis or not, shrinking party mem-
berships provide a strong motivation for organizational reform, whether it is
to secure more members for functional reasons, or simply to demonstrate the
party’s legitimacy. For example, following the findings of Tan (1997: 371),
Wauters (2014: 64) hypothesizes that for those political parties with declining
memberships, the decentralization (and potentially the democratization)
of leadership-selection procedures reflects the desire of elites to stabilize
party memberships and curb the trend of decline. In the case of the
German SPD and CDU, both Mjelde (2013) and Bukow (2012: 6) argue
that the reforms undertaken in the last decade in these parties have been
also motivated by membership decline and the need to preserve these
parties’ organizational legacies—an important factor being that in the
German system, declining memberships go hand in hand with shrinking
party finances.
As the remainder of this chapter will demonstrate, when political parties
introduce reform initiatives, whether these pertain to policy development,
decision-making processes, campaigning, or personnel selection, the attain-
ment or maintenance of a strong membership organization is at the
32 Party Reform
forefront of both intra-party and public campaigns for change. However,
this is a misleadingly simple target. As the case studies show, there are
three distinct themes that emerge when organizational reform is used to
respond to membership decline, which potentially create a series of
internal tensions. The first is that reform is directed towards increasing
the size of the membership. The second involves reform as a way in which
to strengthen the role of members, or to address a breakdown in intra-
party democracy. The third variation involves a combination of these two
different strategies.
The Australian Labor Party is also using a similar reform strategy of growing
the membership by incorporating individuals with a prior connection to the
party. In March 2014, party leader Bill Shorten launched an ambitious plan to
double the party’s membership by giving those who donate to the party the
ability to ‘opt in’ to gain internal voting rights.4 Addressing the party’s
National Policy Forum, he argued that ‘membership processes need
to match the reality of the modern world’, that union membership should
no longer be a requirement for party membership, that donors needed to be
embraced, and that the 233,000 people on party email lists in 2013 needed to
be placed on membership rolls (Shorten 2014). This announcement comple-
mented a rhetorical shift from ‘broadening and increasing the membership of
the Party and involvement of the members in Party activity’, which was a term
of reference of the earlier 2002 National Committee of Review intra-party
inquiry (Hawke and Wran 2002: 6), to ‘the need to broaden participation
in the Party to ensure a greater say for members, supporters and stakeholders’
in the Review 2010 (Bracks et al. 2011: 5). Outside Australia and the United
Kingdom, this dual strategy of growing the party’s base by targeting both
members and supporters has been adopted by the Liberals in Canada, as well
as the two major New Zealand (NZ) political parties (Liberal Party, Canada
2011: 4; NZ Labour Party 2012a; NZ National Party 2013).
Interestingly, the evidence presented here conflicts with the motivations for
party reform that Bram Wauters (2014) found in his analysis of the Belgian
case. Wauters (2014: 64) had expected that membership decline would con-
stitute an important driving factor for organizational reform. However, in
interviews he conducted on the experience of the Belgian parties in introdu-
cing leadership primaries in the 1990s, he noted that while most interviewees
admitted that ‘attracting new members and keeping old members on board
was a goal when adopting party primaries’, it was only a secondary goal, or
a bonus. The reason Wauters cited for this ‘is the declining importance of a
large membership’ (2014: 71; see also Scarrow 2015: 16–17). This contradict-
ory empirical evidence may reflect the exceptionalism of Belgium, the par-
ticular perceptions of the interviewees, or the difference between what
parties say in public and what they are prepared to say in private. However, it
may also be explained by the fact that the primaries Wauters referred to
are ‘closed’—in the sense that they extend candidate selection to all party members,
The Internal Drivers of Party Reform 35
but not beyond them (Wauters 2014: 65). If the major concern of parties is
redefining membership to open up the party to greater participation from affiliates
and supporters, then these views may not necessarily be inconsistent.
Strengthening Membership
The second key theme that is evident from party reform initiatives examined
in this research is the need to ‘strengthen’ the party organization and, in
particular, to remedy potential democratic deficits in intra-party processes
and restore the rights of party members. Despite the possibility that primaries
might dilute the influence of party members, the suggestion that they will
increase and revitalize membership is used as a key rhetorical device in selling
the message of reform. This sentiment is also evident in academic accounts of
the trends towards greater inclusiveness in leadership selections. For example,
Kenig (2008) documents a radical shift in party leadership-selection processes
in the period between 1976 and 2007, particularly in Canada, the United
Kingdom, Japan, and Israel. He argues that these changes ‘were designed to
overcome an intra-party democratic deficit and to bring the citizens back
into the political process’. Like Cross, writing of the experience of leadership
selection reform in Canada (1996), Kenig found these parties’ primary motiv-
ations for reform revolved around responsiveness, transparency, representa-
tion, and competitiveness—ideals that reflected ‘the desire to reduce [the]
oligarchic tendencies of parties by creating a participatory revolution and by
providing the rank-and-file members a chance to make a difference’ (2008: 241).
The recommendations of internal reform reviews in the Australian Labor
Party, which were undertaken in 2002 and 2010, strongly emphasized the
need to respond to branch members’ concerns that they felt ‘frustrated and
ignored’ and were not given any voice in the party (Bracks et al. 2011: 7).
These concerns were, in turn, reinterpreted by senior party parliamentarians
to suggest that ‘rank and file members needed a greater say in policy’, and that
party reform needed to ‘reinvigorate and empower an ageing, declining and
increasingly disenfranchised membership’.5 In reforming the leadership-
selection process of the party in 2013, former party leader Kevin Rudd spelled
out in ‘unambiguous terms’ the rationale for the changes, which included
giving the rank and file a say equal to the caucus in the selection of the party
leader (Kefford 2014: 5).
Within Australia, the motivation for introducing candidate- and
leadership-selection reforms as a means to increase the role of members is
not limited to the social democratic party. Subsequent reviews into the
conservative Liberal Party organization have also argued the need to
strengthen the party on the ground by increasing the involvement of members.
For example, the Victorian division of the Liberal Party’s Party Futures
36 Party Reform
review identified a ‘groundswell for cultural change in the Party: to make it
inviting and to increase member participation’, and that it was ‘clear that
having a say in the choosing [of] the individuals who will represent the Party in
elections is one of the main reasons why people join the Party’ (Liberal Party,
Victoria 2008: 14, 32). This is not, however, a new argument within the party.
The 2008 Victorian Liberal Party review echoed the suggestions of an internal
review conducted more than thirty years earlier, which suggested that the
‘plebiscite system’ (or closed primaries), ‘could get to the root of one of the
Party’s longstanding problems—the low level of membership. A plebiscite
system could be an incentive to membership because it would give every
registered Liberal Party supporter the right to vote in the preselection of his
or her candidate’ (Valder 1983: 88). Former prime minister John Howard
suggested that giving members this right was even more important in conser-
vative parties, where policy making is a prerogative of the parliamentary
party (Howard 2015, interview with author). In introducing the very first
candidate-selection primary to Australia, another conservative party—the
National Party—saw the potential for this exercise to ‘attract a large number
of new members to local branches’ and give electors ‘a sense of ownership and
connection with a body that may otherwise seem closed and remote’. It would
‘invigorate the local branch and provide it with a greater purpose than simple
fundraising activities’ (NSW National Party 2010: 4).
This motivation also underpinned the organizational reform initiatives
contained in the Canadian Liberal’s Change Commission report, A Time to
Act, which resolved to ‘strengthen and empower our Party’s grassroots . . . The
end result will be a more open and democratic Party—united around Liberal
values—better able to compete and win’ (Liberal Party, Canada 2009: 13), as
well as policy development reforms in New Zealand’s Labour Party—‘overall
the goal was to increase membership participation’ (NZ Labour Party 2012a:
7–8). Similarly, resolving to offer a culture that ‘welcomes members, provides
them with support and takes their opinions seriously’, the German Social
Democratic Party acknowledged that membership participation is inextric-
ably linked to the structural opportunities and conditions offered by political
parties (SPD 2011: 3, 5). Moving from delegate assemblies to membership
votes was regarded as a way to ‘empower all members to play a greater role in
creating political will and in nominating functionaries and mandate bearers’
(SPD 2011: 5–6).
While it is reasonably well established in the existing literature that party elites
and activists may be ‘enthused’ by goals that go beyond electoral consider-
ations (see, for example, Miragliotta 2015a: 701), the role of ideology and a
party’s founding goals is typically conceptualized as a constraint on the
trajectory of reform (Panebianco 1988; Bille 1997: 386; Miragliotta 2015a:
702). In this way, it is expected that the age of political parties, their organ-
izational ethos, and the degree to which internal structures and processes have
become institutionalized will influence the direction of reform. The experience
of the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom provides an example of the
way in which ideology and organizational history influence debates, and thus
potentially constrain party reform. While both the Conservatives and the
Labour Party have significantly reformed their candidate-selection processes
over the years, and more recently opening up these selections to the wider
public, there has been little interest within the Liberal Democrats in pursuing
this path. Although the Conservative Party experiments in Totnes and
Gosport sparked debate among some Liberal Democrat activists, the party
remains ‘strongly committed to internal party democracy, and there is there-
fore opposition to diluting the privileges of membership by allowing outsiders
to select party candidates’ (Williams and Paun 2011: 39).
In their study of leadership selection, for example, Cross and Blais (2012:
39) suggest that newer political parties, with less institutionalized organiza-
tional ideals, might more readily embrace organizational innovations as a
way of differentiating themselves from their competitors. The formation and
first leadership election in the Italian Democratic Party also nicely illustrates
the relationship between party age and democratic innovation. At the forma-
tive debates leading to the creation of the Democratic Party, the party was
conceptualized by Walter Veltoni and his staffers to be one ‘without
membership’—to encourage the participation of citizens and voters in less
intensive and more ad hoc ways than within traditional party organizations.9
40 Party Reform
Although this model of organization was subsequently moderated to one
encompassing both ‘electors and members’ (Bordandini et al. 2008: 316–17),
the relatively ‘loose’ definition of membership and the organizational ethos of
the ‘open party’ was entirely consistent with the open primary (in which over
3.5 million Italians participated) that was used to elect its first leader.
But equally, we find numerous examples of ideology and organizational
ethos being used to justify reform initiatives and to more positively shape the
direction of party change rather than to block it. As Scarrow (2015: 19–20)
and Gauja (2013) argue, organizational choices are essentially ideological
products, encompassing a wide array of normative decisions about the direc-
tion of the political party and the particular attributes it wishes to be known
for, for example, ideology, links to social groups and movements, or policy
and/or leadership capacity. For both the Australian Labor Party and the
Australian Liberal Party, the persistence of long-standing ideas about party
organization is prominent within their most recent reviews. Barry (2015:
161–2) notes, for example, that the very deliberate moves by Robert Menzies
to establish a Liberal Party with a mass membership and a strong extra-
parliamentary party back in the 1940s ‘have modern-day echoes’ in the
emphasis placed in modern Liberal Party reviews on ‘building a strong
and active membership base, and strengthening the capacity of the Federal
Organisation’.
This link between ideology and organizational reform is also evident in the
way in which the party–trade union relationship has been restructured in the
UK Labour Party. Under the banner of Building a One Nation Labour Party
and reforming the leadership-selection process, the recommendations of the
Collins Review significantly altered the traditional relationship between the
party and its union affiliates. Unions retain their collective constitutional role
within party structures, however union members will now make a choice as to
whether or not they would like to make a financial contribution to the party
through their union (affiliation fees). After a transitional period, the number
of trade unionists who consent to paying the levy will govern the scale of a
trade union’s collective affiliation. Levy-paying union members are also given
the option of joining the party individually—at no extra charge—as affiliated
supporters. Supporters will enjoy the right to vote in leadership contests and
primaries, but not select parliamentary candidates (Collins 2014; see previ-
ous discussion, pp. 32–4). Unsurprisingly, the reforms elicited significant
criticism from the union movement, where many saw the proposals as
fundamentally undermining the principle of collective affiliation—whereby
trade unions, not unionists, are members of the party (see, for example,
Ewing 2013).
A critical reading of the Collins Review provides several examples of how a
party’s organizational ethos is carefully used to promote rather than constrain
reform, and to reconcile what might otherwise be seen by many as contentious
The Internal Drivers of Party Reform 41
changes with the broader logic of historical roots, organizational develop-
ment, and modernization. For example, the changes to trade union affiliation
are presented in the context of a detailed history of reform within the party,
acknowledging the importance of its structure as a ‘federation of organisa-
tions’, yet acknowledging that ‘the builders of Labour’s post-war organisation
believed the new structures would evolve over time’ (Collins 2014: 11–12).
Altering the means by which unions contribute affiliation fees to the party is
framed as creating ‘a more transparent link with trade unions’, and the
process of creating links with individual trade unionists is framed as ‘a closer
relationship with levy paying trade unionists’ (Collins 2014: 20–4).
The deference to existing party organizational structures and a founding
ideology is also evident in the way in which Australian Labor Party leader Bill
Shorten announced that he would be directing the party’s National Executive
to remove the long-standing requirement that party members must also be a
member of their relevant workplace union. In announcing the change as part
of a broader speech on party reform, Shorten (2014) declared that
So far this chapter has considered two broad motivating factors for party
reform: functional imperatives (maintaining and enhancing a membership)
and ideological considerations (implementing institutional designs consistent
with the organizational ethos of the party). However, if we think about the
political party as an arena comprised of numerous individuals and groups—
each with differing interpretations of ideology, of different policy ideas, and
political strategies—then the battle for organizational control would also
constitute an important motivator for party reform. As Barnea and Rahat
(2007: 378) argue, if intra-party actors are regarded as behaving in accordance
with their rational self-interests, then politicians ‘can be expected to attempt
to enhance or protect their status in the intra-party hierarchy (and their image
in the public eye) through change (or preservation) of the rules of the game’.
The Internal Drivers of Party Reform 43
In existing accounts of party change, leaders and factions are seen as the
most important actors in this battle. As actors in the process of reform, the
role of leaders is discussed further in Chapters 7 and 8. The remainder of this
chapter looks specifically at factions and other collective groupings within
political parties, but shifts the focus from factions as participants in reform, to
factions as motivators for reform. In doing so, the analysis highlights how
factions and other collective actors are portrayed as ‘undemocratic’ in reform
debates, and as groups that operate at the expense of more transparent and
individualized forms of intra-party decision making.
In contrast, the Australian Labor Party has been reluctant to overtly cite factional
influence as a specific reason for the introduction of primaries, although these
groups have been named more generally in both recent federal party reviews as a
cause for concern, and as a primary reason for ‘opening up’ a range of party
processes to more broadly based involvement from the membership. In 2002, the
National Committee of Review Report noted the following:
in all political parties there will be a tendency towards some form of
association between individuals who share the same orientation on
policy matters. But there is widespread, genuine dissatisfaction with the
deadening impact of factionalism and the associated phenomenon of
The Internal Drivers of Party Reform 45
branch stacking. We make a number of recommendations directed to
these issues and calculated to broaden the basis of membership activity,
capacity for involvement in policy formulation and the election of parlia-
mentary and conference representatives. (Hawke and Wran 2002: 5)
The subtle way in which the authors of the 2010 review dealt with the issue of
factional influence contrasts with the strong views of party members who were
quoted in the report. Members argued that reform should be based on making
‘branches more relevant and factions less relevant’ and that ‘while we continue
to allow the factional carve up of positions and decisions are taken on factional
grounds, people will continue to be turned off ’ (Bracks et al. 2011: 8). Given the
party’s long history of factional intervention in candidate-selection contests
(Leigh 2000), this may signify the continued dominance of these groups and
their desire to preserve power within the organization. But the emphasis on
opening up the party rather than constraining the power of factions may also
reflect that reforms are as much an exercise of public rebranding as they are of
organizational change, and the construction of a positive party image is para-
mount. These themes are discussed in greater detail in Chapters 7 and 8.
Taking place without any sustained consultation within the party, the
reforms to leadership selection within the Australian Labor Party that were
instituted by former prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2013 also provide evidence
of the importance of factions—or more accurately, the desire to mitigate their
influence—as prominent reason for reform. The changes were made during a
period of leadership instability (although as Chapter 4 argues, the idea had
been circulating within the party for some time previously). Upon becoming
prime minister for the second time in June 2013, one of Rudd’s first acts was to
announce changes to the way in which party leaders could be selected and
removed. The model of selection that Rudd proposed, and which was later
adopted by the parliamentary party group, was that leaders were no longer to
46 Party Reform
be selected by an exclusive vote of the parliamentary party, but by a ballot
split 50/50 between the parliamentary party and the membership.
Kevin Rudd claimed that his reforms to the leadership-selection process
were necessary to break the ‘absolute union-based factional power which
enables factional thugs to click their fingers and decide who the next leader
of the Labor Party was going to be’.14 The reforms, which ultimately con-
strained the power and flexibility of the parliamentary party in removing and
appointing leaders, were also explained as increasing the rewards of party
membership: ‘each of our members now gets to have a say, a real say in the
future leadership of our party. Decisions can no longer be simply made by a
factional few’ (Rudd 2013a). Unions, which are often affiliated with particular
factions in the ALP, were not allocated a share of the vote in the contest.
Rudd’s position on the issue was that ‘what we are seeking to do here with this
reform is say to all our friends and supporters in the trade union movement,
we want you active in the branches of the Australian Labor Party . . . That is
where we want to see the activism of our trade union friends and that is what
this reform is designed to encourage’ (Rudd 2013a).
NOTES
1. Although Barnea and Rahat (2007) identify party splits and mergers as a relevant
catalyst for organizational change, an analysis of this specific factor is beyond the
scope of the study as there were no splits or merger within the parties in the time
period under consideration.
2. The German Social Democrats are a great example of this: ‘we have always seen
ourselves as a democratic membership party with a program—and this we want to
retain, even in a changing society. This is why we are opening ourselves up’ (SPD
2011: 2). See further, Chapter 5, pp. 87–94.
3. The 2011 conference of the UK Labour Party adopted the principle of opening the
ballot for the leadership election to registered ‘supporters’, once their numbers
exceed 50,000 (Faucher 2015a: 809; Gauja 2013: 107). The introduction of a
registered supporters’ category of affiliation is discussed in greater detail in
Chapter 5.
4. Mark Kenny, ‘Bill Shorten outlines goal to lift ALP membership’, Sydney Morning
Herald, 8 March 2014.
5. Senator Mark Abib (former New South Wales (NSW) Labor State Secretary) and
NSW Labor Opposition Leader Luke Foley, quoted in the Sydney Morning
Herald, 29 March 2011, p. 6.
6. N = 670. The survey was conducted by YouGov and commissioned by the LabOur
Commission (YouGov 2006).
The Internal Drivers of Party Reform 49
7. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), ‘Dubbo votes down community
preselection trial’, News Online, 15 October 2009.
8. In expanding participation but at the same time rewarding loyal party activists, this
model bears some similarity to the ‘optimum’ model of candidate selection suggested
by Hazan and Rahat (2010: 174–5), which balances the ideal outcomes of candidate
selection: participation, representation, competition, and responsiveness.
9. See, for example, Vassallo and Passarelli (2016).
10. Davey (2008: 23) also notes that ‘from its earliest days . . . the country party
[Nationals] in NSW rejected the idea of pre-selecting candidates for parliament.
Originally anyone who accepted the constitution and platform of the party could
nominate as a candidate and, providing inquiries by the party’s central council
uncovered nothing untoward about a person’s character or personal affairs, they
would be endorsed. This frequently led to five or six country party candidates
contesting the same seat’.
11. See, for example, Economou (2015); Leigh (2000); and Parkin and Warhurst
(2000: 37–9).
12. Heath Aston and Stephanie Peatling, ‘Liberals join the trend of picking by
primaries’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 October 2011; see also Miragliotta and
Errington (2010).
13. Sydney Morning Herald, 5 November 2012.
14. Cited in the Sydney Morning Herald, 9 May 2015.
4
There seems to be little contention amongst party scholars that the logic of
electoral competition—the desire to improve electoral performance—is one
of the primary motivators, if not the most important factor, influencing
party change. Like the influence of factions, however, empirical analyses of
the effect of electoral competition tend to be based on the timing of reforms
and their proximity to electoral setbacks (Harmel and Janda 1994; Harmel
et al. 1995; Cross and Blais 2012; Wauters 2014: 63–4). Hence a relatively
common hypothesis that is tested is whether or not political parties are
likely to implement organizational reforms after an electoral defeat (Chiru
et al. 2015). Perhaps unsurprisingly, where this has been examined scholars
have observed a correlation between defeat and reform. However, fewer
attempts have been made to understand, in more detail, why this might be
the case. Does it, for example, reflect the changing power dynamics within
political parties that a reduction in parliamentary representation might
produce? Is there a connection, or a perception, that reform will increase
votes? Is reform linked to a broader process of organizational renewal and
rebranding?
In this chapter I analyse the importance of electoral competition through a
constructive institutionalist lens, focusing specifically on how political parties,
and in particular, party elites, understand and perceive the electoral benefits of
reform. The chapter is structured according to five key themes, which build on
the Barnea and Rahat (2007) framework presented in Chapter 2 and that
serve as the primary motivators for reform at the level of the party system: the
perceived relationship between reform and electoral success, mitigation of
scandals, contagion effects, organizational branding, and the quality of rep-
resentation. The first three of these motivators feature in the framework
developed in Chapter 2, and the final two are included on the basis of empir-
ical observation. They are the five themes that figure the most prominently in
discourse surrounding reform in the Australian and UK political parties and,
as is evident from the supplementary examples examined, have significant
resonance elsewhere.
Competitive Pressures for Reform 51
THE ELECTORAL BENEFITS OF PARTY REFORM
Party Seat Year Previous party vote Subsequent party vote Change Outcome
(%)
Australia
Nationals Tamworth 2010 40.0 55.0 +15.0 Nationals gain
ALP Kilsyth 2010 38.9 30.5 8.4 Liberal hold
ALP Balmain 2014 30.2 31.8 +1.6 Greens hold
ALP Campbelltown 2014 38.6 50.3 +11.7 ALP gain
ALP Ballina 2014 11.9 24.7 +12.8 Greens gain
Average vote change +6.5
UK
Conservatives Totnes 2009 41.7 45.9 +4.2 Conservative hold
Conservatives Gosport 2009 44.8 51.8 +7.0 Conservative hold
Conservatives Bath 2013 31.4 37.8 +6.4 Conservative gain
Conservatives Berwick 2013 36.7 41.1 +4.4 Conservative gain
Conservatives Boston and Skegness 2014 49.9 43.8 6.1 Conservative hold
Conservatives Clacton** 2014 53.0 24.6 28.4 UKIP gain
Conservatives Dudley South 2014 43.1 43.8 +0.7 Conservative hold
Conservatives Hampstead and Kilburn 2013 32.7 42.3 +9.6 Labour hold
Conservatives Havant 2014 51.1 51.7 +0.6 Conservative hold
Conservatives Louth and Horncastle 2014 49.6 51.2 +1.6 Conservative hold
Conservatives Mid-Worcestershire 2013 54.5 57.0 +2.5 Conservative hold
Conservatives North East Hampshire 2013 60.6 65.9 +5.3 Conservative hold
Conservatives Rochester and Strood** 2014 49.2 34.8 14.4 UKIP gain
Conservatives South East Cambridgeshire 2013 48.0 48.5 +0.5 Conservative hold
Conservatives Taunton Deane 2013 42.2 48.1 +5.9 Conservative gain
Conservatives Tonbridge and Malling 2013 57.9 59.4 +1.5 Conservative hold
Conservatives Twikenham 2013 34.1 41.3 +7.2 Conservative gain
Conservatives Wealden 2013 56.6 57.0 +0.4 Conservative hold
Conservatives Yeovil 2013 32.9 42.5 +9.6 Conservative gain
Conservatives Aberdeenshire and Kincardine 2013 30.3 28.8 1.5 SNP gain
Average vote change +0.9
* Although the ALP also held a community pre-selection in the seat of Newtown in 2014, it is not included here as it was a new seat created through a periodic electoral
redistribution.
** By-elections triggered as a result of Conservative MPs switching to UKIP.
54 Party Reform
In contrast to the enthusiasm displayed by party elites, and as indicated in
Table 4.1, the electoral benefits of experimenting with primaries are actually
quite mixed. For the British Conservatives, the overall change in vote share in
those electorates where primaries were held to select the parliamentary can-
didate (0.9 per cent) did not deviate substantially from the party’s overall vote
share at the 2015 election (a gain of 0.8 per cent across all electorates). In by-
elections held in two constituencies, Clacton and Rochester and Strood, the
conduct of a primary was not enough to defeat two former Conservative
parliamentarians who defected to the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
In Australia, where relatively few primary candidate-selection trials have
been held, Tamworth (Nationals) and Campbelltown (ALP) could be cited as
the two examples in which the introduction of primaries not only saw the
party increase its vote substantially at the election following the primary, but
also win the parliamentary seat. As the first open primary contest in Australia,
the Tamworth community pre-selection benefited from voter interest, with
over 4,000 electors participating (10 per cent of the electorate). Although it
took place at roughly the same time, the Kilsyth Labor experiment attracted
only 170 community participants due to poor publicity and organization and
hence failed to make a substantial impact (Gauja 2012). It was later dismissed
in a post-election review as having ‘consumed a significant amount of
resources, delivered little or no electoral benefit and had incited “disgruntle-
ment” among local members’ (Miragliotta 2011: 4).
The community pre-selections conducted by the ALP in the two Sydney
electorates of Campelltown and Balmain also provide an interesting juxta-
position of the electoral success of primaries as a reform strategy. Both
selections were conducted in March–April 2014 and were open to Labor
members and registered community voters, whose votes were split equally.
In Balmain, 5,110 members of the community took part, alongside 357
branch members, whereas in Campbelltown only 1,061 community voters
participated alongside just 28 branch members.2 While it might have been
expected that the benefits of greater community involvement in the Balmain
contest would flow through to votes in the March 2015 election, this is
not what occurred. The party did experience a modest increase in its vote
(1.6 per cent), but it was not able to defeat the Green Party, which had won the
seat in the previous election. In Campbelltown, by contrast, the ALP
increased its vote by almost 12 per cent and was able to win the seat from
the Liberal Party—despite lower levels of community participation. Party
officials claimed that the relative success of the Campbelltown primary was
due to the fact that it was able to create a new local party membership that,
with the assistance of a committed field organizer, was able to mobilize a
base of support that did not previously exist. Party membership tripled in
Campbelltown after the primary, and unlike in Balmain—where a much
larger and established party organization was already in place—the primary
Competitive Pressures for Reform 55
brought much greater marginal benefits to the party. In this case the perceived
electoral benefits of the primary resulted through the creation of a more
vibrant local party organization.
Chapter 3 examined increasing and sustaining party memberships as an
important motivation for organizational reform. As highlighted in the
example above, party elites also drew a connection between reform initiatives
that increase memberships and electoral success. This practical connection
supports similar findings of a comparative study of the German SPD and
Christian Democratic Union (CDU) (Mjelde 2013), and echoes the writing of
scholars such as Susan Scarrow, who have disaggregated the relationship
between membership and party sustainability by examining the functions
that members perform: providing volunteer labour, providing financial support,
standing as candidates for public office, transmitting ideas and preferences into
party debates, providing electoral support, communicating party ideas, and
enhancing legitimacy (2015: chapter 5). As the Liberal Democrats’ membership
officer Jonathan Steen explained, ‘without party members we have no know-
ledge of the country’ (Steen 2013, interview with author). Members were also
conceptualized as a campaigning resource, seen by Australian Labor Party
campaign officials as ‘invaluable in a marginal electorate where resources are
tight and feet on the ground can make all the difference’.3
Nonetheless, as with the electoral benefits of party reform, academic studies
show no clear correlation between membership increases and organizational
reforms, particularly the opportunity to take part in internal ballots. Faucher,
for example, argues that in Britain and France ‘the efficiency of leadership
selection as a means to recruit more members remains in question, even if it is
likely to have increased the mobilisation of potential voters in the run up to
the general or presidential elections’ (2015a: 813; see also Scarrow 1994: 57).
In some ways, the 2015 UK Labour leadership contest has challenged this
view, with over 100,000 new party members joining to participate in the
contest, and a further 50,000 joining since Jeremy Corbyn was elected (see
Chapter 3, p. 33). Australian Labor Party membership has also increased by
10,000 since the introduction of the membership vote for the party leader in
2013. Whether or not these increases reflect the impact of organizational reform,
electoral cycles, the phenomenon of entryism, or popular party leaders is difficult
to discern—particularly with ‘patchy’ reporting of membership figures in
Australia. Indeed, after the introduction of the Refounding Labour reform
package in 2011, the UK Labour Party actually experienced a small drop in
membership numbers over the following three years,4 despite the reforms
ostensibly strengthening the role of members in policy development, reintro-
ducing the category of registered supporters, and increasing participation
through training and organizing initiatives (UK Labour Party 2011a, 2011b).
Although modest, there is a positive perception on the part of the political
parties that reforms are bringing people back to party politics. These include
56 Party Reform
reforms to membership processes that are designed to reduce the financial cost
for potential new members (see Scarrow 2015: 130). For example, in the year
after the Australian Labor Party lost the New South Wales state election the
implementation of a reduced membership fee of $5 saw the party’s numbers
increase by around 30 per cent.5 In December 2010 the UK Labour Party
implemented a one-year discount (1p) membership scheme for first-time
members under the age of 27 in its ‘speak out for your generation campaign’.
After 24 hours, the party reported in positive tones that the scheme had
already attracted 400 new sign-ups.6 Similarly, Greg Dezman reported an
increase in the National Party’s membership after the Tamworth community
pre-selection (Dezman 2014). Yet, as previously noted, the impact of primar-
ies is greatest in areas where existing party memberships are relatively weak.
Although ALP membership tripled in the Campbelltown area, only 8 per cent
of participants surveyed after the Balmain pre-selection indicated that they
would consider joining the party.7
Furthermore, as the disastrous performance of the Liberal Democrats at
the 2015 general election nonetheless highlights, despite efforts to ‘rebrand’
membership and reform the recruitment process, an influx of new members
will not necessarily guarantee electoral popularity. In 2013 the party
‘rebranded’ the membership product and made changes to the way in
which revenue from membership subscriptions was distributed internally so
as to provide incentives to local branches to recruit and, if possible, to sign
new members up via continuous direct debit. The rationale behind the
reforms was intended to
improve our retention rate, improve our income and improve the local
party income. They can spend that money on campaigning, the financial
resource for the campaigning resource goes up. They knock on more
doors, they get a higher profile. They increase the likelihood of somebody
saying yes when they’re asked, do you want to join? It’s all about
pushing—it’s taking all the different drivers and pushing them all in the
same direction. (Steen 2013, interview with author)
Yet, despite these measures, the party’s vote at the 2015 general election fell to
just 8 per cent. It lost all but eight seats in the Commons and was surpassed by
the Scottish National Party as the third party in UK politics.
Survey evidence from Australia suggests that while reform activities do
provide some limited impact upon public perceptions of the party, this effect is
conditioned by patterns of partisan affiliation. In April 2014, leader of the
Australian Labor Party Bill Shorten proposed a series of reforms to the party
to change the role played by members and unions in the organization. The
proposed reforms were designed to make it easier to be a party member,
eliminating the requirement that individuals had to also be a union member
and proposals to increasing member involvement in the selection of leaders
Competitive Pressures for Reform 57
T A B L E 4 . 2 Effect of ALP reform announcement on voting intentions (percentage of respondents)
ORGANIZATIONAL BRANDING
In Australia, the focus on competence for both the Labor and Liberal parties
has been greater—preventing ‘some of the bad candidates that were picked
last election’,8 and finding the ‘best possible candidate’.9 Former prime
minister John Howard noted in his biography that the social changes that
are muting participation within political parties have also weakened the
available pool of candidates to run for public office. The implementation of
more inclusive methods of candidate selection was a way to remedy this: ‘far
too many new MPs . . . have no working-life experience outside a political or
union office. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the talented outsider to
win party favour’. Howard argued that embracing plebiscites for candidate
selection would be ‘likely to deliver a more representative bunch of future
candidates’ (Howard 2010: 656). Subjecting candidates to more inclusive and
publicly oriented processes of selection is also seen in terms of appropriate
training. As ALP campaign managers explained, ‘to win, a candidate has to
drum up support on the ground, campaigning in local groups, sports teams
and community organisations. All this is excellent preparation for the real
election’.10
The contrast in emphasis between representativeness and competence
shows how potentially contradictory outcomes have been used selectively by
reform advocates to push for the introduction of primaries. Again, the motiv-
ations expressed by political parties in Australia and the United Kingdom
appear to corroborate recent research conducted elsewhere. In Romania, for
example, Gherghina (2013: 188–9) argues that ‘party elites responsible for the
organisation of primaries argued that their adoption aimed to select candi-
dates more fit for representation’, while the NZ Labour Party (2012a: 8)
suggested that a key aim of its organizational reform project was to ‘promote
the election of high-calibre candidates’.
DAMAGE CONTROL
If political parties generally believe that reforms to the party organization will
deliver electoral benefits, an opportunity for rebranding, and better candi-
dates/quality of representation, then it also stands to reason that reforms
Competitive Pressures for Reform 61
might also be implemented as a strategic tool following on from an incident
that has damaged the party’s popularity—such as a political scandal. As
Barnea and Rahat (2007: 384) argue, ‘the adoption of a more open, inclusive
and transparent system . . . can be presented as an antithesis to what is termed
“dirty politics”’. Although Wauters (2014: 69) and Gherghina (2013: 188)
point to the importance of scandal in prompting the introduction of closed
primaries for leadership selection in Belgian and Romanian political parties, as
with the relationship between reform and electoral success, the specific factors
at play are often hard to disentangle—particularly since scandals or other
political setbacks are often cumulative and organizational responses tend to
be slow. The natural tendency would therefore be to link the two events.
Of all the reform events studied for this book, only two can be directly linked
to scandals (in the sense of public allegations of impropriety), whereas one
further party reform—changes to the Labor leadership selection in Australia in
2013—was the direct result of leadership instability and turmoil within the
party. The first of the reforms that can be directly linked to a political scandal
was the UK Conservatives’ decision to experiment with postal primaries
before the 2010 general election. This experimentation was a strategy to
ameliorate some of the damage done to the party in the parliamentary
expenses scandal (McSweeney 2010: 537–8). Both constituencies selected for
the postal primaries—Totnes and Gosport—had previously been held by
Conservative MPs who were directly and publicly implicated in the scandal.
The second instance of reform within the sample of parties examined that
was motivated by a political scandal was the most recent review into the UK
Labour Party organization, Building a One Nation Labour Party, a review
that was commissioned by former leader Ed Miliband in the wake of the
‘Falkirk’ scandal. In what might be described in Australia and other political
contexts as a ‘branch stack’, Unite, one of the party’s biggest union donors,
was accused of signing up its members to the Labour Party in Falkirk—some
without their knowledge—in an effort to have its preferred parliamentary
candidate selected. The union recruited around 100 members to the branch
(which had a total membership of 200) and paid for their memberships as a
block. Whether this could be described as a legitimate recruiting exercise or a
blatant breach of the rules, the scandal resulted in an internal party inquiry,
the suspension of the local branch, a police inquiry, and ‘the biggest reform of
our party in a generation’.11
Announcing the review that would re-examine Labour’s relationship with
the trade unions, Miliband (2013) distanced the party from the events that had
previously happened:
I am here today to talk about how we can build a different kind of
politics . . . About a politics that is open, transparent and trusted. Exactly
the opposite of the politics we’ve recently seen in Falkirk. A politics that
62 Party Reform
was closed. A politics of the machine. A politics that is rightly hated.
What we saw in Falkirk is part of the death-throes of the old politics.12
CONTAGION
When describing the reasons why reforms are adopted in particular contexts,
public policy scholars speak of policy transfer or diffusion (see, for example,
Marsh and Sharman 2009; Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Evans and Davies
1999). The literature on political parties does not talk of policy transfer but
does speak of ‘contagion effects’. Contagion—at its most basic—can be
defined as ‘copying the behaviour of successful parties’ (Gauja 2012: 652).
However, as a mid-level phenomenon, contagion as both a catalyst and a
process of change tends to be overlooked, or squeezed out, in the general and
case-specific approaches to party change. In general accounts, contagion
effects flow from leadership or factional change, as new personnel bring
with them new ideas and practices (Harmel et al. 1995: 4). Specific accounts,
by their very nature, are limited in identifying forces for change that originate
beyond the party—unless the source of and inspiration for these changes are
acknowledged by actors within the party.
In the limited instances in which contagion is specifically mentioned in
studies of party change, it tends to be conceptualized in terms of the competi-
tive environment (Gauja 2012: 653–4). For example, in his study of why
Belgian political parties have embraced primaries for the selection of the
party leader, Wauters (2014: 64) argues that ‘parties that are operating in a
competitive arena look at each other and tend to copy features of party
organisation that prove to be successful’. This effect, Wauters notes, only
applies to what the major parties do—if a minor party embraces change, it
does not necessarily follow that other parties in the same system will follow.
Referring back to the discussion earlier in this chapter of the relationship
between reform and electoral success, positive perceptions of the impact of
reform on a party’s ability to win votes are not only used as a justification for
reform within the party, but may also provide a catalyst for reform across
multiple parties operating within the same system, with the actions of the
64 Party Reform
larger—or more established—parties holding more influence. The extent to
which contagion effects might also travel across democracies is a subject for
empirical investigation.
Contagion, as it has been used to date in studies of party organization, has
referred exclusively to the transfer of organizational traits between political
parties. However, as described below, there is evidence to suggest that at the
same time as fending off competition for participation from other types of
political organization such as advocacy groups, political parties are learning
from them, too. These adapted processes might include the establishment of
online campaigning and issue-advocacy platforms, or less obligatory forms of
membership affiliation, such as the way in which membership is conceptual-
ized in online advocacy groups such as GetUp, Avaaz, 38 Degrees, and
MoveOn (Bimber et al. 2012; Karpf 2012; Kreiss 2012) and more traditional
interest groups such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International (Jordan and
Maloney 2007: chapter 4). Contagion, therefore, is a concept that not only
captures policy transfer between political parties (whether in the same party
system or across geographic divides) but also between political parties and
other types of political organization.
There is no systematic way within the field of party scholarship to accur-
ately identify instances of contagion. Previous research has relied on two main
methods. The first is to infer contagion by comparing the substance and
timing of organizational change across political parties. If party X, for
example, introduces open primaries for the selection of the party leader and
then this is followed by party Y, then contagion could be argued to have
occurred. However, this method fails to differentiate changes that are the
result of contagion, from those driven by coincidence or convergence. Nor are
we given any real idea of the time frame in which these changes should be
made. Can we infer contagion if the subsequent change in party Y occurs a
year after party X, or ten years? The second, perhaps more reliable method of
establishing contagion is to discover the motivations and sources of inspir-
ation for parties in implementing organizational reforms (Seddone and
Venturino 2013; Wauters 2014: 71; Gauja 2012). These might be sourced
from interviews, official party documents (such as reviews), media releases
and statements, and political biographies. A third methodology is to track the
movement of personnel from organization to organization, or in this instance,
from party to party (see, for example, Kreiss 2012: 12; and the methodology
adopted by Vromen 2015 in her study of online advocacy organizations).
The results speak for themselves: when David Cameron was elected leader
of the Conservative Party in 2005, around 235,000 everyday party mem-
bers participated in the ballot. A year earlier, Stephen Harper was elected
leader of the Canadian Conservatives by almost 100,000 members. Cam-
eron and Harper have not faced a spill in a decade. The New Zealand
Labour party recently had 50,000 members participate; the Australian
Labor Party had around 40,000.14
NOTES
1. State Director Ben Franklin, cited in ‘Nationals open Tamworth preselection vote
to public’, Australian, 28 June 2010.
2. Kirsty Needham, ‘Verity Firth wins community preselection for seat of Balmain’,
Sydney Morning Herald, 3 May 2014; Troy Bramston, ‘Community votes with
Labor members on preselections’, Australian, 31 March 2014.
3. Victorian ALP State Secretary and Campaign Director Nicholas Reece and Dean
Rizzetti (Campaign Field Officer), ‘US model can entice punters into politics’,
Age, 11 May 2010.
4. As at 31 December 2011, the membership of the party was 193,300 (UK Labour
Party 2012); in 2012 it was 187,537 (UK Labour Party 2013a); in 2013 it
was 189,531 (UK Labour Party 2014) and in 2014 it was 193,754
(UK Labour 2015a).
5. Sydney Morning Herald, 8 December 2012, p. 7.
6. ‘Christmas offer of 1p Labour membership brings in just 400 new recruits. Andy
Burnham delighted with that’, Guardian, 24 December 2010.
7. Results of the Balmain Community Preselection Survey, conducted online in July
2014 by the NSW Labor Party and provided to the author. N = 534. See further
Chapter 9.
8. An ‘anonymous Liberal Party source’, cited in Heath Aston and Stephanie Pea-
tling, ‘Liberals join the trend of picking by primaries’, Sun Herald, 23 October
2011, p. 11.
9. Victorian ALP State Secretary Nicholas Reece, cited in David Rood, ‘ALP to try
US-style polling’, Age, 9 February 2010.
10. Nicholas Reece and Dean Rizzetti, ‘US model can entice punters into politics’,
Age, 11 May 2010.
11. Former Labour leader Ed Miliband, cited in the Guardian, ‘Falkirk row: We have
very, very clear legal evidence, says Ed Miliband’, 8 November 2013.
12. It is interesting to compare the similarity of a speech delivered by Australian Labor
leader Bill Shorten, where he argued that to respond to allegations of corruption,
‘our best defence is to rebuild our party with a new, more open, democratic and
transparent model of membership’ (Shorten 2014).
13. Former Conservative Party Chairman Eric Pickles, cited in the Telegraph, ‘MPs’
expenses: Gosport voters to get open primary on replacing Peter Viggers’, 29
October 2009.
14. John Ruddick, ‘Labor is right, and we Liberals are wrong: Our members must
elect the leader’, Guardian, 18 February 2015.
Competitive Pressures for Reform 75
15. Tim Harper, ‘Canada’s left importing U.S. campaign tactics’, Toronto Star, 25
November 2013.
16. Online platforms for political engagement are also discussed in Chapter 5.
17. Note, however, the strong Facebook presence of the Canadian Liberals, whose
‘likes’ exceed party membership numbers.
18. These trends also resonate with many of the debates surrounding the ‘personal-
ization’ of politics—see, for example, Balmas et al. (2014) and Karnoven (2010).
5
The political, cultural, and social environment within which political parties
exist is constantly changing, yet—as a moving target—the effect of these
changes on the nature of parties’ organizations and their decision-making
processes is quite difficult to evaluate. Political parties are generally regarded
as adaptive organizations—a trait that is evident in the way in which different
models of party development (for example, the cartel thesis, the electoral
professional party, and the catch-all party) theorize the nature of organiza-
tional change in response to advances in campaigning techniques, techno-
logical developments, increases in public funding, the encroachment of the
state upon party functions, and the decline of broad-based political ideologies.
These adaptations have been comprehensively covered in a wealth of existing
literature on party organizational change.
However, rather than assessing these broader organizational adaptations,
this chapter attempts to identify and analyse the impact of system-level factors
on political parties as mediating agents—that is, as organizations that link
citizens and the state. By its very nature, party organization scholarship takes
the party as the key unit of analysis and often downplays the interaction
between parties and individuals. Yet parties can be seen as responsive to both
changes in the external institutional environment and to citizens’ shifting
demands for participatory preferences. As Scarrow (1999: 344) argues, ‘par-
ties are also electoral competitors, with strong incentives to respond to
changing popular preferences, including preferences about modes of political
activity and organization. Parties’ responses to such shifts may include pro-
moting institutional reforms designed to appeal to, or to counteract, voters’
evolving participation preferences’. For example, the organizational reforms
undertaken by several of Germany’s political parties in the 1990s were
78 Party Reform
initiated as ‘part of self-proclaimed efforts to cater to changing patterns of
citizen participation’ (Scarrow 1999: 342).
On the other hand, however, they could also be regarded as seeking to
shape the political behaviour and democratic practices of individuals. As
Scarrow (1999: 342) observes, ‘because parties hold a central procedural
role in all electoral democracies, they are especially well placed to initiate or
block changes to the institutions that provide the setting, and the incentives,
for individual participation’. Hay (2007: 55) argues that ‘virtually no consid-
eration is given to a range of potential supply-side factors . . . changes in
the substantive character of the “goods” that politics offers to political “con-
sumers”’. Not only does supply designate the policies (or goods) presented to
the citizenry, it can also encapsulate the participatory opportunities on offer,
particularly if we conceptualize political actors as operating within a com-
petitive marketplace for participation (see also Faucher 2015b: 406–7; Bruter
and Harrison 2009, 2; Whiteley 2007). Linking this with the decline in party
membership, supply-side explanations indicate that unless they ‘drastically
change the experience of party membership in order to compete with more
attractive and associational free-time options’, political parties will be unable
to arrest the decline of membership (Scarrow 2015: 19).
the 2013 General Social Survey, Canadian citizens also prefer these partici-
patory activities, as well as wearing badges and t-shirts in support of political
causes, to volunteering for political parties (Turcotte 2015: 16–17).2
There are two ways in which changes such as these might impact upon the
nature of party organizations, particularly as participatory arenas. The first is
the potential withdrawal of political parties from society (Mair 2005). Faced
with declining memberships, political parties might look elsewhere for
resources, policy input, and legitimacy. This is the response which has
received a significant degree of academic attention and is characterized by
the notion of a ‘hollowed-out’ political party—one with a greatly reduced
organizational structure in which party leaders communicate directly with the
electorate by utilizing mass communications technologies, resourced by the
state. Internal democracy is largely illusory, as the focus on largely inactive
and moderate individual members privileges the parliamentary party by
circumventing party activists and other centres of power within the party
such as national conferences and regional and local branches (Blyth and
Katz, 2005; see also Faucher-King and Le Galès 2010: 95). Decision making
and influence within the party becomes ever more centralized in the party in
public office and the leadership. As Katz (2001: 293) describes, it is a strategy
of ‘empowering while decapitating the membership’. In this mould, party
scholars have documented a greater move to individualization in membership
recruitment, candidate selections, and intra-party leadership elections associ-
ated with ‘democratizing’ initiatives such as party primaries (see, for example,
Systemic Pressures for Reform 83
Cross and Blais 2012; Gauja 2012; Hazan and Rahat 2010; Faucher-King
2005: 201–11; Young and Cross 2002; Hopkin 2001; Seyd 1999).
The second option is that political parties change their internal structures
and processes to better reflect these patterns of participation. While the
organizational manifestation of both these adaptive paths may look similar,
the willingness of parties to meet new participatory preferences is an area that
is less studied, and it is an approach that puts the normative question of how
political parties ought to engage citizens temporarily to the side. If political
parties adapt or evolve to new institutional environments, it stands to reason
that they must also respond to a new type of politically active citizen. This
may require a radical rethinking of what we mean by the notion of a political
party as a mediating institution and where its organizational boundaries lie.
At the very least, a more nuanced account of what it means to be active
within, or engaged with a political party, is necessary—one that moves
beyond the notion of a formal member.
However, the task for political parties is not an easy one. Writing within
the context of online social movements, the observations of Bennett and
Segerberg are extremely relevant here:
While these new realities present challenges for political parties, they are also
portrayed to present a series of opportunities. These are usually linked to a
process of modernization, or in the words of the NZ Labour Party, creating ‘a
future-fit 21st century organisation to drive change’ (NZ Labour Party 2012a;
2012b). In launching the ‘Reforming Labour to Win’ document to the UK
Labour annual conference in Liverpool in 2011, party elder Peter Hain
explained that ‘in an age of 24 hour news and Internet, politics may have
become more global and national, but it has also become more local, and
that’s where our opportunity lies as a party’ (Hain 2011b). As explored further
in Chapter 7, Hain’s speech to conference—the first at which Labour’s 2011
reform initiative was reported to party members and the broader public—
portrayed this climate as one in which political change needed ‘to be delivered
from below—at the grassroots of our movement—in every constituency
party’. This was seen to present a ‘challenge for each and every one of us—
to build a quite different type of party in tune with the new politics rather than
remaining with the old’ (Hain 2011b). For the French Socialists, the decline of
their traditional political project created the opportunity for a democratic
revolution with audacity and innovation (Socialist Party, France 2009: 3).
The way in which the review describes the political context faced by the Labor
Party is interesting not only because it acknowledges the specific factors that
affect Labor’s long-term viability as a social democratic party, but also the
broader challenges faced by all political parties and indeed other participatory
organizations—albeit in a rather oblique way. Although the specific nature
of the changes is not expanded on in the 2010 review document, the architects
of reforms to intra-party processes are cognisant of what they believe to be
changing patterns of, and preferences for, political participation at play. The
NZ Labour 2012 organizational review suggested that in order to establish
itself as a modern party, Labour needed to ‘be a social movement for change’,
Systemic Pressures for Reform 87
‘be easy to associate with’, and ‘connect its members with enjoyable, engaging
political activism’ (NZ Labour Party 2012a). Nicholas Reece, former state
secretary of the Victorian Branch of the ALP and Dean Rizzetti, a former
campaign field officer, described the trial of a primary for the selection of their
party’s parliamentary candidate as having found inspiration from the ‘under-
lying changes occurring in society that are having a profound effect on how
people engage in their community’, and attributed its claimed success as
‘being driven by some of the same factors that are behind the success of
these new forms of civic engagement’. Specifically, Reece and Rizzetti pointed
to the ‘lower barriers of entry in terms of the level of political commitment
required to engage in our political system’ and the fact that the process ‘gave
people an opportunity to engage in something in which there was a clear
outcome from their involvement’.3
One of the most considered (if not slightly patronising) examples of political
parties attempting to take stock of the nature of participatory changes in
society is provided by the German Social Democrats. In the party’s 2011
organizational review, Party on the Move, it noted that:
People’s expectations towards politics have changed. More and more
citizens are reluctant to dedicate themselves to long-term political activities;
they simply want to have a say when it comes to instant decisions . . . So
instead of trying to catch up with these changes in political attitudes, we
lead the way. We are concerned with concrete local issues and try to involve
as many citizens as possible. We are making it easier to come on board our
party and are establishing ourselves as a magnet for anyone wishing to
make a commitment to the social democratic cause. (SPD 2011: 4)
An illustration of the way in which social media and online participation have
been treated rather flippantly by mainstream political parties is in the descrip-
tion of the online strategy adopted by a candidate in an Australian commu-
nity pre-selection trial. The candidate explained that he/she had ‘an
interactive website, a Facebook group which I’ve already got started and a
Twitter which I know that the young people are all into’,8 demonstrating
knowledge of all the stereotypes and limitations of online political communi-
cation and participation. While the candidate was ultimately unsuccessful,
perhaps more worrying was the fact that he/she was a party staffer.
In contrast to other political organizations such as interest groups, political
parties outside the United States have typically been slow in adopting online
technologies for communicating with members and facilitating participation
(see, for example, Cardenal 2013; Chen 2013: 26–8; Chadwick 2007). How-
ever, the increasing prevalence of digital media in creating new sites for political
expression seen, for example, in the development of party blogs and citizen-
initiated campaigns (Chen 2015; Gibson 2015; Gibson et al. 2013) means that
online participation should form a much greater part of party organizational
studies in the future. The recent UK Labour leadership-selection contest,
Systemic Pressures for Reform 95
which attracted 344,000 votes online, was the largest online poll in the
country’s history.
As part of the broader recognition of a changed participatory climate,
political parties are rapidly appreciating the need to pay serious attention to
the possibilities of online participation, particularly as an avenue to engage
both members and non-members through issue-based policy-making initia-
tives and campaigns. For ‘rising star’ Australian Labor Party parliamentar-
ians Clare O’Neil and Tim Watts, ‘enabling online engagement’ is the most
basic way in which to make ‘Australia’s democratic institutions more respon-
sive to the ways in which citizens want to engage with them’ (O’Neil and
Watts 2015: 26). For the German Social Democrats, this involves the recog-
nition that these changing forms of organization and communication mean
that ‘it is not the party that decides how to address and organize people—we
leave the people to decide that for themselves’ (SPD 2011: 4).
The way in which the policy-development process has evolved in the UK
Labour Party since 2003 illustrates the increasing importance of online,
issues-based opportunities for political engagement, although similar initia-
tives have also been undertaken in Australia (see Gauja 2015b). Moving
further and further away from the branch-based model of policy development
and building on the perceived success of the predominantly offline policy
consultation exercises ‘The Big Conversation’ and ‘Let’s Talk’ (see Gauja
2015b; 2013), the party employed these techniques once again in its 2011
initiative, ‘Fresh Ideas’. Now out of government, the focus of the initiative
shifted away from commentary on set policies to seeking new policy ideas.
However, the party remained committed to reaching out beyond its trad-
itional boundaries to ordinary members of the public for policy input. The
party’s own published statistics highlight the ‘unprecedented’ level of activity
and demonstrate just how extensive this individualization has become. Once
policy positions would have been the product of the party conference; now
they have become the product of ‘4 million contacts with the public’, 6,000
people attending public consultation events, 2,000 written responses to the
policy review, and 16,000 people taking part in online activities via the
consultation website ‘Fresh Ideas’, contributing ‘thousands of ideas electron-
ically’ (UK Labour Party 2011d: 5).
In 2013 the UK Labour Party launched the online consultation initiative
‘Your Britain’ (<http://www.yourbritain.org.uk>), which was described as
Labour’s online policy hub: ‘Whether you’re a Labour Party member, a
trade union member, a representative of a voluntary organisation or business,
or none of the above, we want to hear your ideas on how the next Labour
Government can tackle the challenges that face Britain’ (UK Labour Party
2013c, emphasis added). Your Britain allowed citizens to engage with the
party on an individual basis, with the focus on communicating information
around issues rather than heavily branded principles or ideologies, ensuring
96 Party Reform
that ‘taking part in our policy development work has never been easier nor
our processes more open and accessible’ (UK Labour Party 2013d: 6). The
Labour Party logo featured only at the very bottom of the webpage, with lists
of issues (for example, young people and politics, the NHS and healthcare,
and the housing crisis) dominating the layout, along with the call to ‘tell us
what you think’ (UK Labour Party 2013c).
These broad policy-development initiatives also are also occurring at the
same time as more specific issue-oriented online campaigns are being used to
engage members, supporters, and voters through online platforms such
as Nation Builder (discussed in Chapter 4). According to the Liberal Demo-
crats, Nation Builder was used successfully in the Eastleigh by-election to
build candidate Mike Thornton’s campaign and to establish issue-based
sites around job creation (<http://www.amillionjobs.org>), taxation reform
(<http://www.fairertax.org>), and the European Union (<http://www.
whyiamin.org>), which ‘helped us blast through records on online fundrais-
ing, engaging voters and signing up supporters’ (Liberal Democrats 2013).
Key features of Nation Builder sites include the ability to link to social media,
to specific issue campaigns, to enable users to easily donate or volunteer, and
to create databases of user activity. Membership of the party is downplayed
and rather supporters and followers are invited to take immediate action,
through, for example, liking the campaign on social media, signing an online
petition, donating to the cause, or making phone calls. UK Conservative
Party conference delegates were encouraged to support the party’s comple-
mentary strategy of creating networks of supporters through issue campaigns
and ‘micro-websites’, such as the sites ‘For Hardworking People’ and ‘Protect-
ing Our Children’. Chairman Grant Schapps explained that such micro-sites
were valuable tools for harvesting emails and personal details for potential
Conservative voters. These Conservative campaign sites are characterized by
very limited party branding.
The use of online platforms in policy consultations such as Your Britain
responds to the perception that
To build a more responsive political organisation, we need to build
institutions which enable supporters to help realise the political outcomes
they are seeking in the way that they choose, while also retaining the
ability for the party to resolve conflicts between competing interests and
present a coherent agenda to the public. (O’Neil and Watts 2015: 26)
NOTES
1. See, for example, Bader (2014); Pemberton and Wickham-Jones (2013); Delwit
(2011); Hay (2007: 20–3); Bartolini and Mair (2001); Lawson and Merkl (1988).
2. The 2013 Canadian General Social Survey reported that 27 per cent of respondents
had signed a petition, 22 per cent had undertaken a boycott/buycott, 11 per cent had
worn a t-shirt or badge in support of a political cause, while only 2 per cent had
volunteered for a political party (Turcotte 2015: 17).
3. ‘US model can entice punters into politics’, Age, 11 May 2010.
4. Letter sent to Tamworth residents, ‘Be a part of history’, sent by Andrew Stoner in
May–June 2010.
5. Cited in Manning River Times, 20 January 2009.
6. Patrick Wintour, ‘Labour conference: Non-members get to vote in leadership
elections’, Guardian, 25 September 2011.
7. See Mjelde (2015) for a theoretical categorization of the different ways in which
parties permit non-member participation.
8. ABC Radio PM, 16 February 2010.
Part II
Chapters 3–5 have been concerned with establishing the primary motivations
for party reform and trying to understand how political parties—and in
particular, party elites—perceive the pressures for renewal that come from
within the party, from the necessities of electoral competition, and finally
from social and cultural shifts occurring at the level of the political system.
This chapter steps back to take a look at where the reform initiatives under-
taken by our case study parties sit within a broader comparative context, by
examining how they relate to one another as well as comparing these trends to
existing research on similar developments in other democracies. It evaluates
party reforms in three ways: in terms of the function or decision-making
process to which the reform is targeted (policy development, candidate selec-
tion, leadership selection, etc.), the direction of the reform (does it create a
more inclusive process?), and the time at which the reform took place. The
chapter then analyses these characteristics in light of several factors that have
been identified as potential explanations for party change, including the type
and age of party, electoral performance, legislative position, and major per-
sonnel changes in order to identify when parties implement reforms, what they
reform, and how this varies over time and space. In particular, the discussion
in Chapter 2 identified two key expectations that are investigated: that estab-
lished democracies with similar problems of citizen disaffection and party
decline should experience similar trajectories of organizational reform, and
that the ideological disposition—or party family—to which an organization
belongs should shape the type of reform that it pursues.
the United Kingdom (Table 6.2). Like Australia, there has been a distinct
concern for increasing the inclusiveness of candidate-selection methods
through the trial of semi-open and open primaries, and establishing sup-
porters’ networks. The Labour Party was the first to introduce the scheme
in 2006, which lasted in its first iteration until 2009 (Gauja 2013). It was
subsequently reintroduced as part of the Refounding Labour reform initiative
in 2011. Interestingly, although the Labour Party has developed more reform
initiatives over the last decade than the Conservatives, it has been the Con-
servatives that have led the way with the gradual implementation of open
primaries for candidate selection.
Comparative Patterns of Reform 105
MOST SIMILAR PARTIES: PATTERNS OF REFORM IN SOCIAL
DEMOCRATIC PARTIES IN AUSTRALIA, GERMANY,
NEW ZEALAND, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM
particular party functions. In this analysis, two questions are relevant: (1)
what are the specific organizational functions targeted by party reform; and
(2) what is their effect on the nature of the decision-making processes associ-
ated with these functions?
Comparative Patterns of Reform 107
Comparing party reform projects in Australia and the United Kingdom,
the main area of party organization that has been targeted has been the
selection of candidates for public office, which accounts for 38 per cent of
all the different reform proposals by the six major political parties. This is
followed by changes to membership criteria and types of membership, as well
as reforms directed at the policy process. These two areas—membership and
policy—account for around 19 and 16 per cent of reform initiatives, respect-
ively. While too much should not be inferred from the analysis with only a
limited number of reform proposals (thirty-seven in total across the two
democracies), what can be taken away from this brief snapshot is that political
parties appear to concentrate their reform efforts on candidate selection.
Candidate Selection
There are several possible explanations for this particular focus on candidate
selection. The frequency of reforms in this area might reflect the fact that
candidate selection is important: it is a high-stakes, high-profile activity, and a
function that political parties still have a monopoly over, even if some of the
other functions they perform have arguably diminished over the years. It can
be used to reach out to the community, but it can also be deployed as a reward
for membership. It is therefore crucial that parties get this process ‘right’.
Previous studies have also shown that there is no ‘best’ way of selecting
candidates for public office. The implementation of particular mechanisms
for candidate selection carries both intended and unintended consequences
that reflect different, and often conflicting, normative visions of representative
democracy (Cross 2008; Hazan and Rahat 2010: 173–4). Changes to, and
experimentation with, the process of candidate selection will therefore reflect
this broader normative contestation (see also Chapter 3).
More frequent reforms pertaining to candidate selection might also reflect a
number of practical considerations. The first is that as long as the reform is
labeled as an ‘experiment’ or a ‘trial’, it will most likely not require a consti-
tutional amendment even though it may create a substantive change in the
process. Free of rules-based administrative constraints, political parties are
free to experiment as much as they wish. Chapter 7 discusses this issue in more
detail—as a process where political parties may in fact create reforms by
‘stealth’. The second practical consideration is the fact that there are many
different representative arenas to which this experimentation can be applied:
national, subnational, and supra-national legislatures are often treated differ-
ently in terms of candidate-selection processes, and therefore create the
opportunity for more reforms.
In recent years there has been a significant increase in scholarly interest in
the implementation of ‘primaries’ within both European democracies (Sandri
108 Party Reform
et al. 2015b; Indridason and Kristinsson 2015a; 2015b) and more widely
across the globe (Kenig et al. 2015; Gauja 2012; Hazan and Rahat 2010).
The list of political parties having now used open or semi-open primaries for
the selection of candidates or party leaders is now quite extensive: including
the French Socialists (Faucher 2015a: 804), almost all of the Spanish political
parties (Barbera and Teruel 2015), the Israeli parties (Hazan and Rahat 2010),
the Italian Partito Democratico (Vassallo and Passarelli 2016; Sandri et al.
2014), and the Canadian Liberals (Cross 2014: 176).1
While Tables 6.1–6.3 certainly indicate that there is greater willingness to
entertain the idea of semi-open and open primaries, which constitute over half
of the reforms that pertain to candidate selection, to suggest that these two
methods are becoming the dominant mode of selection overstates their prom-
inence. While their selective use by political parties across the spectrum might
indicate that a normative shift is underway, as Chapters 3 and 5 argued,
because these reforms blur the boundaries of party and give non-members a
greater say, there is still significant internal contention surrounding their
wholesale implementation. In this sense, all three slices of the ‘Swiss cheese’
model, or the three layers (intra-party, party system, and competitive system)
have not yet aligned to produce widespread reform and the wholesale imple-
mentation of primaries. This contention is explored further in Chapter 9.
What is clear from the evidence presented, however, is that parties are
moving to more inclusive methods of candidate selection, confirming trends
reported elsewhere (Hazan and Rahat 2010: 92). Each of the reform initiatives
proposed by the parties, also including the NZ Labour Party and the German
Social Democrats (even though the latter is constrained by external party
laws)2 increased inclusiveness in some way: whether this was through an open
primary (38 per cent), a semi-open primary (19 per cent), or simply expanding
the say accorded to the membership (13 per cent). For open and semi-open
primaries this has resulted in greater numbers of citizens participating (see
Gauja 2012), but whether or not it has also increased party membership is not
as clear (see Chapter 4).
Policy Development
A further 16 per cent of reform initiatives over the last decade in the Austra-
lian and UK major parties have concerned the policy-development process.
The majority of these reforms, as discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5, have
represented the creation of specific policy initiatives: Think Tanks (ALP) and
Let’s Talk, Fresh Ideas, and Your Britain (UK Labour), which consolidate
the process of ‘opening up’ the party to participation from non-members
through structured policy consultations. All of these consultations have fea-
tured a significant online component through which feedback and ideas from
individuals can be received and aggregated (Gauja 2015b; 2013: 89–116). Like
the experimentation with open and semi-open primaries, reform in this area
has been achieved just as much through changes to ‘everyday’ and executive
practice not requiring constitutional amendment, as it has through
110 Party Reform
substantive rule changes. Reforms undertaken in this way potentially present
a ‘lower-cost’ activity for parties seeking to rebrand themselves—as the need
for internal approval can be circumvented, while opportunities for public
engagement can be maximized.
Nevertheless, reforms to ‘traditional’ intra-party policy structures have also
featured alongside these lower-cost activities throughout the last decade of
party organizational reform. For example, drawing inspiration from the UK
Labour Party’s National Policy Forum, which was originally established by
UK Labour in 1997 as part of its Partnership in Power reforms, the Australian
Labor Party created its own version of the National Policy Forum at the 2011
National Conference. Consolidating representative structures within the
party rather than relying on direct modes of communication with members
and supporters, the purpose of the ALP’s National Policy Forum was to
provide a ‘direct link to grassroots policy development through directly
elected members’ (ALP National Right 2011: 8; see also Cross and Gauja
2014). New Zealand Labour’s 2012 organizational review also led to the
development of a similar (though smaller) representative structure for policy
development and oversight: the Policy Council (NZ Labour Party 2012b;
2012c).3 In its 2011 reforms, the German SPD lowered the membership thresh-
old for intra-party ballots from one third to 20 per cent of members, thereby
undertaking what Bukow (2012: 9) describes as a ‘re-traditionalisation’ of party
structures and of organizational self-understanding.
Leadership Selection
Bram Wauters (2014: 62) argues that although the democratization of
leadership-selection procedures varies across countries and parties, it never-
theless constitutes a ‘clear trend’. However, Pilet and Cross (2014), using
comparative data over five decades, are more muted in their assessment.
They argue that the selection of leaders through party conventions is still
used most frequently, and that while parties do adopt more inclusive methods
when they change their selection processes, ‘the image of a universal and even
irresistible evolution towards full member votes or even towards open pri-
maries is far from reality’ (Pilet and Cross 2014: 228). The empirical patterns
here indicate that like candidate selection, the general direction of reforms to
the leadership-selection process is increasing inclusivity, although the number
of actual reforms undertaken in this area is much smaller, comprising only
10 per cent of the number of reform initiatives across all parties surveyed.
The fact that there are relatively fewer reforms to leadership selection
probably stems from the fact that different parties start from different posi-
tions: that is, the British parties already began to ‘democratize’ their selection
processes in the 1980s (Cross and Blais 2010: 44–6). Although leadership-
Comparative Patterns of Reform 111
selection reform may only be a small proportion of change overall, it none-
theless reflects three major events: the shift away from parliamentary parties
exclusively selecting the leader in both the Australian Labor Party and NZ
Labour, and a shift to the one-member-one-vote system in UK Labour, with
the inclusion of registered and affiliate supporters and the removal of the
union bloc vote. With the conservative parties in Australia and New Zealand
still being the outlying examples of parties selecting leaders only through their
parliamentary group, the three instances reported here support the suggestion
of a general trend towards the democratization of leadership-selection
methods in parliamentary democracies (Kenig et al. 2015; Pilet and Cross
2014; Kenig 2009: 437).
As with candidate selection, although the shift to primaries for selection of
the party leader is important from the perspective of norm creation, it should
not be overstated. In only one instance, the UK Labour reforms, could the
selection process be classified as a semi-open primary, with the selectorate
comprised of individual MPs, members, and supporters, without a weighted
component. Again, the reluctance to embrace opening up the party’s
leadership-selection process, as with candidate selection, reflects the conten-
tious politics that underlie these reforms (also see Chapter 9), despite the fact
that they are usually portrayed as universal democratizing initiatives.
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
well have copied, or learned from each other, in the area of leadership
selection and the implementation of open policy forums the Labor Party
has stood alone.
In the UK, it is only in the establishment of registered supporters as a
category of affiliation that contagion seems to have played a part, with the
Labour Party having originally implemented the scheme in 2006, after which
it was picked up by the Liberal Democrats (2008), the Conservatives (2009),
and then reintroduced again by Labour in 2011. Interestingly, ten years
passed since the Conservatives first used open primary meetings to select
some of their parliamentary candidates until the idea of a semi-open primary
was rather grudgingly adopted by the Labour Party for the selection of its
London mayoral candidate. The analysis presented in Chapter 3 provides a
possible explanation for this: whilst the practices of other political parties
might facilitate party reform, internal contestation over the nature of the
reforms is a significant factor that political parties must also grapple with.
As suggested in Chapter 2, reforms are most likely to occur when motivations
at all three levels (intra-party, party system, and political system) align, and in
the absence of intra-party acquiescence, the reform agenda may stall.
Based on the timing of the reforms alone, evidence of contagion effects
across both countries is difficult to ascertain. Again, looking at the introduc-
tion of registered supporters, there was a clustering of activity across both
democracies from 2006 to 2009, with the UK Labour Party initiating the
process in 2006 (Gauja 2013: 108). However, whilst we also see the subsequent
114 Party Reform
trial of open and semi-open primaries adopted in Australia, this came four
years after the UK Conservatives had first used the method. A similar lag
occurred between the first use of policy consultations in the UK Labour Party
and their later adoption by the ALP.
The issue of timing is therefore a difficult one. Is there, using this method of
inference, a particular time period within which a reform might said to have
been copied by others, and hence contagion said to have occurred? The
example of leadership-selection reform is illustrative here and demonstrates
the need for a mixed-methods approach to analysing contagion. As explained
further in Chapter 8, proponents of leadership-selection reforms in both the
Australian and New Zealand social democratic parties cited the experience of
UK political parties, and in particular UK Labour, in extending their selec-
tion processes beyond the parliamentary party as both a reason for reform
and as an experience that could be learned from. Yet, the ‘democratization’ of
candidate selection in the UK Labour Party occurred thirty years earlier. If
we relied on the timing of reforms as inference of contagion, then this would
not be an example of such an event, but if motivational factors and the
movement of personnel from party to party are considered, then this would
be a good example of the transfer, or copying, of practices across political
parties. A final caveat regarding contagion should also be added: in the
absence of motivational evidence, it is difficult to distinguish contagion
from the effects of diffusion or convergence. Diffusion and convergence
present similar explanations for the transfer of practices or institutions, but
these concepts emphasize external constraints and pressures rather than the
primacy of actors within the organization (Marsh and Sharman 2009). While
contagion does certainly appear to play some part in organizational reform,
the process is difficult to identify and isolate, and is certainly an area of
academic inquiry that could be developed further in the future.
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
1. For a comparative list of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ primaries in use for leader, chief
executive, and legislative candidate elections as at December 2014, see Sandri and
Seddone (2015: 10).
2. According to German party laws, the formal selection of candidates for public
office, as well as the selection of the party leader resides with the party congress
(Spier and Klein 2015: 88–9; SPD 2011: 6).
3. New Zealand Labour’s Policy Council comprises fourteen members, representing
the rank-and-file membership, the parliamentary caucus, Maori organizations, the
Party president, and general secretary. Provision is also made for representation
from the Party’s Sector Councils (e.g. Women’s Council, Young Labour, etc.)
(Constitution and Rules 2014, Rules 180–4). This contrasts with the much larger
membership of the UK Labour National Policy Forum (194) and the Australian
Labor Party’s National Policy Forum (69) (see Gauja 2013: 61–2).
4. There are, of course, exceptions—see, for example, Wauters (2014); Cross and Blais
(2012).
5. However, Chiru et al. (2015: 47–8) found that ideology plays little role in
influencing a party’s propensity to change its leadership-selection rules. See also
Wauters (2014: 65), who charted similar trajectories of leadership-selection reform
across left, right, and centre Belgian parties.
6. Quoted in the Weekend Australian, 14–15 July 2012, p. 19.
7
The idea that decline is inevitable actually directly threatens our success
at the ballot and our likelihood of remaining in power in the next
parliament . . . We need to change this because if we anticipate failure
then that’s what we’ll experience. (Liberal Democrats membership offi-
cer, interview with author)
The primary source of data used to analyse the process of party reform is
internal party reviews. As Chapter 6 explained, organizational reform is not a
particularly frequent phenomenon, however, the last decade (2006–15) has
seen a clustering of major reviews—as opposed to ad hoc initiatives—among
social democratic parties in not only Australia and the United Kingdom, but
also Germany and New Zealand. Consequently, the analysis here will draw
on four corresponding review documents: the 2010 National Review (Austra-
lian Labor Party), Building a One Nation Labour Party: The Collins Review
into Labour Party Reform (UK Labour), Party on the Move: The SPD’s
Organizational Policy Program (German SPD), and Labour’s Organisational
Review 2012 Discussion Paper (NZ Labour). The main features of these
reviews are detailed in Table 7.1. Because the aim of the analysis is to better
122 Party Reform
T A B L E 7 . 1 Party organizational reviews
2010 National ALP (Australia) February Steve Bracks (ex-premier), John Public
Review 2011 Faulkner (MP), Bob Carr
(ex-premier)
Party on the SPD (Germany) September SPD Party Board Public
Move 2011
Labour’s New Zealand May 2012 Rick Barker (MP), Ruth Chapman Public
Organisational Labour (party activist and office holder),
Review Mark Hutchinson (organizational
analyst), Nanaia Mahuta (MP)
Building a One UK Labour February Ray Collins (Labour peer) Public
Nation Labour 2012
Party
understand the process of reform and how consensus and image is developed
through a largely inductive approach, focusing on four social democratic
parties is appropriate for several reasons. First, major party reviews in the
time period under consideration have simply been more common amongst
social democratic parties—enabling the assembly of a more comprehensive
body of evidence. Second, because of the traditional association between
social democratic organization and intra-party democracy, reforming these
parties inevitably means balancing a range of vocal internal party interests
(members, affiliated organizations and trade unions, etc.). Consequently,
conclusions drawn from the analysis are only directly applicable to the social
democratic parties under consideration, but some reflection is made on the
generalizability of the findings and several comparisons made to organiza-
tional reviews beyond the social democratic party family.
In 1994, Susan Scarrow argued that ‘changes in party perceptions are
difficult to recognize both because much party decision-making is diffuse,
and because parties are not introspective’. She also noted that ‘party strat-
egists seldom conduct systematic assessments of party organizational needs
and, even when they do so, seldom publicize their conclusions’ (Scarrow 1994:
58). In the past twenty years, review documents have become more common-
place, and when supplemented with other sources of data, such as media
reports and interviews, provide a stronger source of data with which to
evaluate the changing nature of elite perceptions. Not only can internal
party reviews be used to examine the process of reform, they also provide a
good—if not often underutilized—source of data on party organizations.
Particularly in contexts where access to the internal machinations of political
parties is tightly guarded, party reviews provide an important and often very
The Process of Reform 123
detailed source of information on the ‘state’ of the party organization, a
reflection of how the party perceives its strengths and weaknesses and its
future direction.
One might argue, however, that party reviews are simply public relations
exercises designed to diffuse criticism after an electoral defeat, in a way similar
to how governments set up public inquiries to deflect damage after a public
scandal (Barry 2015: 164). Working against this perception is the fact that
reviews are not always publicly released in a timely manner (if they are
released at all), often present findings deeply critical to the party, and
involve a substantial investment of time and organizational resources. Former
Australian Liberal Party politician Peter Reith, for example, revealed that he
had to ‘force the public release’ of his 2011 report.1 While reviews may deflect
criticism, recognition of what is wrong with the organizational structure of the
party and what could be done better is an important part of achieving
consensus.
As Chapter 6 notes, each of these reviews was commissioned within twelve
months of an electoral setback. Although the Australian Labor Party did not
suffer defeat at the 2010 federal election, it did reduce its primary vote share
and lose eleven seats in the House of Representatives, which meant that it
could only govern with the support of the Greens and the Independent (non-
party aligned) parliamentarians. Audience is also an important consideration.
While all of these reviews were prepared and circulated to an internal audience
(party members and conference delegates) in preparation for rule changes,
each review also made it into the public domain. All four reviews were reported
in mainstream media at the time at which they were announced and when the
final reports were released. Each of the reviews was authored by, or the
committees comprised of, prominent party politicians, either ‘statesmen’,
parliamentarians, or high-ranking party officials.2 The SPD and New Zealand
party review panels were also assisted by a broader group of advisers, which in
the case of New Zealand Labour included a former political director and
communications analyst and a technology businessman.3
Extent of Consultation
The party reviews analysed differed somewhat in the extent to which members
were consulted in the deliberations of the committees, and how this was
highlighted in the reform documents. However, the fact that consultation
took place was a common theme amongst all four. This ranged from the
extensive and multi-faceted consultation exercises conducted by the Austra-
lian Labor Party and the German Social Democrats (Bracks et al. 2011; SPD
2011), to the NZ Labour Organisational Reform Committee’s more ad hoc
approach of consulting ‘widely with members’, talking to those outside the
party—both in New Zealand and overseas—as well as offering people the
opportunity to comment via an ‘online facility’ (NZ Labour Party 2012a: 3).
The Building a One Nation Labour Party review reflected a more individual-
ized approach to consultation, in which Ray Collins (the Labour Lords peer
charged with undertaking the review) ‘visited every region and nation, meet-
ing and talking to CLPs [Constituency Labour Parties], regional boards, trade
unions and socialist societies to listen to people’s views’ (Collins 2014: 5).
Depending on the party, review consultations were conducted through a
mix of interviews, surveys, forums, party meetings, and working groups, as
well as the solicitation of written submissions from interested groups and
individuals inside and outside the parties. While written submissions were
the most ubiquitous method of gathering feedback in the four reviews exam-
ined, the Australian Labor Party used its 2010 National Review to experiment
with online processes. In parallel to the party’s call for written submissions,
the 2010 review created an online ‘Think Tank’ area for both party members
and the public to ‘put forward their brief suggestions for Party reform’. In
what was essentially the cultivation of a process of consultation that was
highly individualized—relying on short statements from individual members
of the public—the volume of submissions was key to the legitimacy of the
exercise. The review noted that: ‘an extraordinary 3,500 members and sup-
porters chose to participate in the Review in this way. These short submissions
The Process of Reform 125
were then compiled into one document, with views highlighted and aggre-
gated. A number of recommendations for this report are directly drawn from
this consultative process’ (Bracks et al. 2011: 6).
The German SPD organizational reform consultation was specifically
designed to integrate all levels of the party into the exercise—beginning with
a survey of all SPD local and district associations—which was distributed
back to the party. Based on the results of the survey and the ensuing discus-
sion, the executive formulated a series of questions for reform and formed
intra-party working groups in order to discuss them and develop recom-
mendations. At this point, an advisory board was also created, consisting of
academics and ‘experts from other organisations, associations and enter-
prises’ (Totz 2011: 9), providing the opportunity for dialogue not only within
the party, but drawing from the experiences of other political organizations.4
This first stage of the review process ran for a little over a year (from March
2010 to April 2011) and was followed by a second stage in which the discus-
sions, views, and opinions from the various workshops and surveys were
formulated into policy proposals by the party’s general secretary and a
representative committee of all Land and district associations. A special
conference to discuss the proposals was also held, executive visits made to
the local and district associations, and further feedback was solicited, in what
was a very comprehensive process of consultation and advocating the message
of reform.
As Totz (2011: 9–10) argues, this consultation process was ‘completely
different’ to previous reform processes, which were initiated at the level of
the executive and then fed down through the party. By contrast, the SPD’s
2011 Party on the Move project was distinctly branded as a bottom-up
process, under the motto ‘the party first, then the committee’ (Totz 2011: 9),
through which the party, ‘for the first time in the history of the SPD . . . ques-
tioned all local branches and sub-districts about their working procedures and
their expectations’ (SPD 2011: 2). Importantly, irrespective of the changes
proposed, the process itself—as a consultative, bottom-up, and open forum—
was marketed as an integral part of the reforms. Jurgen Hitzges, head of the
‘Party Life’ department of the SPD Executive, argued that ‘given the
approach that has been taken, the process of party reform is already part of
party reform’ (cited in Totz 2011: 10). Sebastian Bukow, however, is more
critical of the way in which the SPD marketed the process versus the reality. In
his assessment, the reform process ‘was more or less the usual procedure:
working groups were formed, experts invited, papers and resolutions pre-
pared, discussed, adjusted and finally enacted’ (Bukow 2012: 7).
If we analyse party reviews as strategic exercises, then the disjuncture
between the way in which consultation is portrayed—and the reality of the
process—is not really surprising. The reviews described above, particularly
those of the ALP and the SPD, illustrate the way in which consultation is used
126 Party Reform
to bolster the legitimacy of the reform process, whether this is done through
an online consultation, intra-party meetings, surveys, etc. Although different
mechanisms for consultation exist, in all reviews, consultation has been
highlighted at the beginning of the review and used to frame the discussion
that follows. The ALP in particular took great pains in emphasizing the
quality of the submissions, the work put in by members, and the fact that
they were read and acknowledged. Over 800 written submissions were
received through the party review website, with the review noting ‘the many
hours of work that went into those submissions’ as well as the presentations
made by stakeholders at review forums and workshops (Bracks et al. 2011: 4).
Adopting a slightly different angle, the NZ Labour Party highlighted the
positive experience felt by members in being able to participate: ‘members
frequently commented that they valued the opportunity to have their say’ (NZ
Labour Party 2012a: 3).
Consultations are one important way in which political parties can gather
support, particularly from within the party, to create a smoother—and argu-
ably more legitimate—process of reform. However, as argued throughout this
book, reform initiatives that are more likely to be successful are those in which
the main motivating factors at each of the three levels are able to be reconciled
to create the trajectory for change. In doing so, a political party can appeal to
both internal and external audiences, turning the need for organizational
reform into a ‘watershed event’, where proposed resolutions have the poten-
tial to ‘result in sweeping constitutional change and radical operational
modernization’ (Liberal Party, Canada 2011: 2). An analysis of a range of
party review documents reveals a number of different rhetorical strategies for
achieving reform by carefully articulating the problem, the nature of the
solution, and then the organizational response. The four strategies are: bring-
ing together the various motivations for reform, invoking the views of the
The Process of Reform 131
membership as a justification for reform, placing reforms in the context of a
party’s history and traditions, and deploying the rhetoric of modernization
and depicting reforms with urgency and excitement.
The 2012 change to the New Zealand Labour Party leadership contest pro-
vides a final example of the way in which the views of members are used to
justify reform. The reform document that was taken to conference specifically
noted that: ‘there was strong support for more open and transparent processes
at all levels and for the privilege of membership to extend to greater involve-
ment in candidate and leadership selection processes’ (NZ Labour 2012a: 8).
Perhaps reflecting their nature as strategic documents that muster intra-party
support, it is interesting to note that although review committees consult with
outside interests, it is only the views of party members that are illuminated in
these reports. This strategy echoes the recommendations of the Canadian
Liberals’ Change Commission, which argued strongly that ‘the central object-
ive of reform should be to enhance the party’s capacity to perform its core
functions’ and that the key to doing that ‘is to put the sidelined membership of
the party back on centre ice’ (Liberal Party, Canada 2009: 17). Key to
achieving this is strategic communication: ‘members should hear recognition
of the difficulties facing the party and a powerful commitment to renewal or
reform. There is a need for inspiring language that will reassert the importance
of the membership. Likewise members need to hear an affirmation of foun-
dational values and a commitment to honour the constitution’ (Liberal Party
of Canada 2009: 17).
The rhetoric of modernization was also frequently coupled with the portrayal
of changes with a sense of immediacy and excitement. For the German SPD,
‘to be alive means to change’, while for the Liberals in Canada, ‘Our successes
have been characterized by our resolve to challenge assumptions, to be wary
136 Party Reform
of the status quo, and to act on our impulse that there is always a “better
way” ’ (Liberal Party, Canada 2006: 6). Similarly, Bill Shorten, leader of the
Australian Labor Party, argued in his speech on party reform that ‘for Labor
to build a modern, outward-looking, confident and democratic Australia, we
have to be a modern, outward-looking, confident and democratic party’
(Shorten 2014).
PATHWAYS TO REFORM
While party review documents can employ these various strategies to create
consensus and advertise an appetite for change that portrays reforms in a
positive light, there are particular areas where a consensus is extremely
difficult to achieve. The implementation of primaries is a good example of
this, which was flagged in Chapter 3 in the discussion of the tension between
growing and strengthening party membership. Originally proposed and advo-
cated by SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel, the implementation of primaries was
removed from the Party on the Move document after significant opposition to
the process was highlighted in the local and regional associational surveys
(Bukow 2012; Totz 2011). Proposals for primary elections also faced signifi-
cant criticism in the context of the Collins Review into the UK Labour Party
organization. Although a semi-open primary for the election of the London
mayoral candidate was proposed and approved by conference, the review
noted that submissions ‘have revealed differing views on the question of
primaries, but with a majority against the widespread use of this process’
(Collins 2014: 33, emphasis added). This final position advocated by the
review represented a significant change from the enthusiasm of Ed Miliband’s
speech in which he announced the review, in which primaries were put
forward as a potential ‘pioneering idea’ for the selection of parliamentarians
in the case of a retirement (Miliband 2013). Yet, the debate on primaries
within the party is not split randomly, but by organizational tactics. As one
former Labour staffer explained, the hard right and hard left of the party
(which both control the extra-parliamentary party) are both opposed to the
use of primaries. Given this balance of power, primaries will ‘need to be
rammed through by party elites’. The views of party members, elites, and
activists in these instances have therefore required some element of comprom-
ise or concession on the part of the party leadership.
Conversely—even in the context of reviews commissioned by parties and
authored by respected committees, resistance from the leadership can also
complicate the passage of reform. Irrespective of their origins, not all reviews
have been met with enthusiasm from the party leadership. Peter Reith, author
The Process of Reform 137
of the Liberal’s Review of the 2010 Federal Election, noted in his report that
‘the practice of not releasing reports because they contain uncomfortable
truths has not served our cause well’, and recommended that the Federal
Party ‘archive of all these reports and make them available to interested
members upon request. Federal Executive should also resolve now that all
future election reviews will be publicly released’ (Reith 2011: 10–11). In the
case of the most recent NSW Liberal Party review, media reports suggested
that the executive of the party reacted negatively to the document—‘judged by
the fact it did not release the Howard report that it received in June until this
month’, and that there was ‘little fanfare in the release’, which simply consti-
tuted ‘an attachment to a penultimate paragraph of a lengthy memo to
members by the state president’.9
Unlike other organizational changes that result from the changing practices of
party officials, which often are not—either intentionally or unintentionally—
publicized, these experiments can nonetheless constitute extremely high-
profile activities that offer significant opportunities for public branding and
renewal. Turnbull’s speech, for example, although delivered to a party audi-
ence, was also covered by the national media. Although it is a direct and
practical approach to reform, over time and with repeated use primaries can
become self-evidently associated with democracy and participation (Faucher
2015a: 816).
rules literally mean that a person could hang on as Labor leader and as
prime minister even if every member of cabinet, the body that be the most
powerful and collegiate in the country, has decided that person was no
longer capable of functioning as prime minister . . . Indeed, the new rules
represent exactly the wrong approach to address the so-called ‘revolving
door’ of the Labor leadership. These rules protect an unsupported, poorly
performing, incumbent rather than ensuring that the best person gets
chosen and supported for the best reasons. (Gillard 2013)
Despite these criticisms, the amended proposal passed through the caucus
relatively smoothly. This is surprising given the amount of power that the
parliamentary party ceded, but is largely explained by the timing and context
of the reform process. Considerations of the electoral damage caused by
leadership change within the party in recent years were of greater concern to
parliamentarians than the prospect of holding future leaders to account. Only
three months out from a general election the leadership change resulted in the
departure of half of the campaign team and ‘severely frustrated and derailed
important policy and messaging work’ (Garrett and Dick 2014: 7).
The changes also demonstrate how important organizational reforms can
be made with only the deliberations of a small number of party elites—in this
process, parliamentarians. It also demonstrates the complexity of the process
and the ambiguity surrounding the nature of these changes. In 2015, two years
after the initial change, the question of leadership selection was finally pre-
sented for debate and ratification at the ALP National Conference, where the
constitution was to be amended to retrospectively approve the changes imple-
mented by Kevin Rudd, changes that shaped the 2013 Labor leadership
contest between Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese. However, the constitu-
tional amendment that conference agreed to merely codified the requirement
that the votes of the parliamentary party and the party membership be
weighted equally, and only in instances where the ‘rules of the FPLP [Federal
Parliamentary Labor Party] require the election of the Leader of the FPLP
to include a ballot of party members’ (Article 26). Hence while the
leadership reforms were heavily publicized as a watershed moment for the
party—and indeed the actual contest that took place was a significant change
The Process of Reform 143
to the process—the subsequent constitutional ratification essentially retained
the power of the parliamentary party to select the way in which its leader
is chosen.
CONCLUSION
The examples discussed in this chapter have pointed to two distinct trajector-
ies, or processes of party reform. The first, which is typically achieved through
a relatively lengthy process of party review, seeks to achieve broad consensus
within the party through consultation and debate, culminating in the ratifica-
tion of the document by a party conference or similar representative body.
Recent reforms such as Party on the Move (German SPD), Building a One
Nation Labour Party, and Refounding Labour (UK Labour) are examples of
this approach. The second trajectory is one in which reform is also highly
publicized, but for various reasons does not require the approval of the party
organization in order to proceed. The 2013 reform to the ALP leadership-
selection process is one example, as are the ‘trials’ of primaries that have been
conducted within various parties, and many recent campaigning and
community-organizing initiatives, which have been implemented via party
executives.
NOTES
1. Peter Reith, ‘Time for some revitalisation of the Liberal Party’, Sydney Morning
Herald, 28 September 2015.
2. The composition of review committees is discussed in further detail in Chapter 7.
3. New Zealand Herald, 28 February 2012.
4. See Chapter 3.
5. The survey was commissioned by the NSW Executive of the Liberal Party and
fielded to 11,000 party members between 19 December 2013 and 14 February 2014
(Liberal Party, NSW 2014). It was organized in a voluntary capacity by party
member and academic Denise Jepsen. It showed modest support for the
proposition that reforms be instituted to allow members to select the party
leader (52 per cent agreed or strongly agreed) (Liberal Party, NSW 2014: 17).
Support for shifting to a plebiscite of all local members was 47 per cent, the current
combined delegate system was 51 per cent, and moving to a system of primaries
had only 26 per cent (Liberal Party, NSW 2014: 18). There was strong support for
greater membership involvement in policy—83 per cent said that there should be
144 Party Reform
more effective structures to develop and test policy ideas than currently exist
(Liberal Party, NSW 2014: 23).
6. Peter Reith served as a senior minister in the Howard government from 1996 to
2001.
7. ‘They [plebiscites] better fulfill the concept pursued by Menzies to broaden the
base of the Party’ (Reith 2011: 21).
8. Contrast, for example, the words of Bracks et al. (2011: 13), ‘If we do not grow and
expand our membership, if instead membership continues to decline, then
discussions about “party democracy” become meaningless’, with those of
Howard (2014: 6): ‘It is the strong view of the Panel that energetic recruitment
of new members . . . is essential to the Party’s continuing health’.
9. Australian, 15 August 2014.
10. Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 2012.
11. Quoted in the Australian Financial Review, 9 December 2011, p. 9.
12. Sydney Morning Herald, 8 September 2015.
13. However, Sergiu Gherghina also notes that primaries in the Romanian PSD were
organized in a ‘relatively centralised setting’. The decision ‘was not immediately
included in the statute, but in a special regulation by the Executive Committee of
the party’ (Gherghina 2013: 190–1).
14. Cited in the Australian, 10 July, p. 1.
15. Australian, 23 July 2013, p. 1.
16. Australian, 12 July 2013, p. 8.
17. Parliamentarian Daryl Melham, Australian Associated Press, 9 July 2013.
18. Parliamentarian Stephen Jones, Illawarra Mercury, 10 July 2013, p. 2.
8
Chapter 7 illustrated how political parties interpret and use the drivers for
change that were discussed in Chapters 3–5 to create a positive narrative for
party reform, as well as to rebrand the party organization through the rhetoric
of modernization. This chapter shifts the analysis from the institution of the
party as a whole, to an examination of who, or what, is driving and opposing
reform initiatives—both within and outside parties. In engaging with the
broader debate as to the role of structure and agency in creating party reform,
the chapter does not assume that parties are coherent or unitary entities, nor
does it assume that all agents of reform reside within the parties themselves.
Through an analysis of the genesis and authorship of reform documents
(including internal reviews, pamphlets, and speeches), who speaks to particu-
lar initiatives, and who proposes and votes for them, the chapter provides an
analysis of the range of actors involved in the reform process.
Although reform debates are often characterized as battles between intra-
party factions or battles between party elites and rank-and-file members, the
chapter argues that a more nuanced approach is required to reflect the reality
of reform with political parties. In doing so, it highlights the significance of
other actors that have not been accorded as much prominence in existing
accounts of party change, such as parliamentarians, party statesmen (often
retired), staffers who have held previous positions in parties overseas, internal
pressure groups, think tanks, and journalists. As illustrated in the specific
strategies adopted by these actors, the public domain is an increasingly
important arena for reform debates, complementing (and in some instances
replacing) traditional intra-party decision-making fora, such as conferences.
PARTY LEADERS
While these speeches may not accurately reflect the actual process by which
reforms are conceived and adopted, and apart from containing a number of
internal inconsistencies, they nevertheless demonstrate the power of the leader
to be able to drive the reform agenda in the public eye, and convey it as a
strong modernizing and unifying force—consistent with the party’s political
project and policies.
PARTY ELITES
Media Commentary
Party parliamentarians will often appear in the media providing commen-
tary on particular aspects of party reform. For example, several years before
Kevin Rudd introduced leadership-selection reform to the Australian Labor
Party, New South Wales parliamentarian (and now New South Wales
opposition leader) Luke Foley argued that people are demanding new
modes of participation, and ‘one way people ought to be able to participate
in the Labor Party of the future is to have a vote on who becomes the party
leader’. At the same time this was reinforced by General Secretary Sam
Dastyari, who argued that ‘if we want to be a serious mass-member organ-
isation in the 21st century, then you have to devolve key decision-making
and that includes a model where the rank-and-file get a say in the party
leader’.9 Where they are not cited directly, media accounts will often place
parliamentarians in ‘camps’ for or against particular reform initiatives,
attempting to measure the potential success of the proposed change on the
basis of the level of parliamentary support it receives—even though the
decision is technically an extra-parliamentary one.
The Protagonists of Party Reform 155
Advocating for Reform
Examining the trajectory of candidate-selection reform in Australia and
the United Kingdom, Gauja (2012) found that parliamentarians played a
particularly important role in generating ideas for reform. Conservative
MP Andrew Tyrie was credited as the first to advocate primaries in the
UK in his pamphlet, Back from the Brink, published in 2001 (Gay and
Jones 2009: 4), although UK Labour MP Frank Field has also argued
strongly for widening the selectorate for choosing parliamentary candi-
dates throughout his career, extending this to primaries in a pamphlet he
published for the think tank Policy Exchange (Field 2008). In Australia,
Ken Coghill, a former Victorian Labor Party politician, penned the first
essay to argue for open primaries in Australia, Let the People Decide
(Coghill 2001). More recently, ALP parliamentarians Clare O’Neil and
Tim Watts proposed organizational reform to make the party more
responsive to what they described as ‘the ways in which citizens want to
engage with them’, including ‘harnessing a latent online political engage-
ment through facilitating issues-based organising through Online Policy
Action Caucuses’ (2015: 26–7). Both described as rising young stars,
O’Neil and Watts entered parliament in 2013 from backgrounds in cor-
porate management and law.
The process by which the trial of an open primary in the NSW National
Party was adopted illustrates the importance of party elites. The community
pre-selection trial was developed as a joint initiative between the campaign
director, communications director, and the parliamentary party leader and
parliamentarian, Trevor Khan. It was then pitched to the local branches.
Khan, explaining why the electorate of Tamworth was chosen to trial the
initiative and illustrating the top-down nature of the reforms, commented:
‘the reason we got it is that I’m the duty MLC [Member of the Legislative
Council] and I was fundamentally attracted by it and campaigned hard
for it, and luckily, the branches were attracted by it’ (author interview
with Trevor Khan, 22 June 2010). Khan also argued that the experience of
reform initiatives, such as primaries, had the potential to be shared amongst
parliamentary colleagues in particular contexts, challenging the perception
that parties’ competitive strategies are closely guarded. In an interview,
Khan noted:
I genuinely see the trial as being not only of benefit to my party but
well and truly beyond my party. I think it will have a very healthy
effect upon particularly the ALP in terms of what it does—and, look
because we’re in the upper house and we have a lot more relaxed
relationship with people on the other side there’s no doubt that there
is an interest there for those very reasons. They can see the potential
that the system has.
156 Party Reform
UK Labour parliamentarian Frank Field provides a similar account of
parliamentarians sharing reform ideas across party lines. Field recalls that
he thought about the idea of holding an experimental primary in his own seat,
but that ‘in discussing the idea with a colleague, who was then a vice Chair-
man of the Tory Party, I was told in no uncertain terms that it was a less than
sensible idea as I would walk the primary’. Subsequently, Field notes, that ‘it
was an idea that did surface, I am pleased to say, in Tory circles’ (Field 2008: 26).
Khan’s suggestion that there is cross-party parliamentary cooperation on
primaries as a reform issue is also reflected in the policy agenda that was
engineered by both the UK Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats for the
inclusion of 200 fully funded postal primaries as part of the 2010 ‘Programme
for Government’. Although the policy was never implemented, it does suggest
that as a professional class, parliamentarians may have a distinct interest in
organizational reforms that stretch beyond party lines, particularly when
public resources can be utilized to defray the costs to the party and candidate
(see Gauja 2012: 648).
One of the most notable traits of the way in which elites have advocated for
party reform is their willingness to go outside the party, putting their ideas on
the public record and hence reaching a wider audience. In some instances, this
could be a reaction to perceived inertia within the party organization. Fol-
lowing the release of the Howard Report into reform of the New South Wales
branch of the party organization, a newly elected parliamentarian, Eleni
Petinos, used her inaugural speech in the New South Wales Legislative
Assembly to advocate for party reform. Linking party organizational reform
to changing the broader political and parliamentary culture—particularly
surrounding the under-representation of women—she argued that ‘if we are
serious about seeing a change in our Parliament, it is time to embrace renewal
in our party . . . That is why I support the proposed Howard reform model for
the New South Wales Division of the Liberal Party and encourage party
reform to be at the forefront of our agenda moving forward’.10 Petinos also
proposed that the party adopt an ‘aspirational target’ of 30 per cent female
representation in the New South Wales parliament following the 2019 state
election.
Although parliamentarians play a particularly prominent role in the pro-
cess, the range of individuals who might be classified as elites is quite broad,
including individuals who are able to attract media attention because of their
profession or position. A judge and former ALP member Anthony Whitlam
took the opportunity at a 2008 graduation address at the Australian National
University to advocate for the introduction of primaries—arguing that
‘removing the party organisations and intermediaries in the selection of
party candidates would deepen community engagement in the political pro-
cess’ (17 July 2008). The dissemination of ideas to a younger generation is
also evident in the way in which Julian Leeser, Executive Director of the
The Protagonists of Party Reform 157
Australian Liberal Party’s think tank, the Menzies’ Research Centre, advo-
cated for primaries in a speech to the Australian Liberal Students Federation
Conference in 2008. Led by a former president of the Australian Young
Liberals, the debate resurfaced online in the conservative blog, Menzies’
House, in 2010.
Sam Dastyari, former secretary of the New South Wales branch of the Labor
Party, was the first to publicly propose that the parliamentary leader be
elected by the membership. Dastyari credited this idea to his experience
travelling to the UK Labour conference to see the election of Ed Miliband.
Dastyari argued that ‘it’s done in the UK, it’s done in France, it’s done in
Canada and the US’,12 also providing an example of how contagion effects
work in practice when they are transmitted through the experiences of party
staff. Staff exchanges are routine between the British and Australian Labour
parties, and with the US parties, which also act as an important means of
disseminating ‘best practice’ techniques for organizing and campaigning. The
ALP, for example, sent several staff and organizers to work on the UK 2015
general election, while UK Progress director, Richard Angel, came for the
2013 Australian federal election. To suggest that through this process reforms
are transmitted uncritically would be a mistake. For example, Australian
Labor Party organizers were not convinced of some of the practices of the
UK organization, labelling it as ‘resistant to change’ and ‘unreceptive to new
campaign technologies’. Although they saw the UK Labour leadership-
selection model as one for Australia, these staffers were less convinced of
the party’s campaign strategy.
In the examples above, party staff worked to establish organizational
reforms on the basis of their own initiative. The Liberal Party in Australia
158 Party Reform
went further to recommend that the federal executive should have the power
to propose a primary, acting on advice from the federal Staff Planning
Committee, with state directors playing a ‘key role in running the primary’
(Reith 2011: 22–3). These recommendations act to consolidate—at least in the
interim—the power to ‘experiment’ with such reforms within the executive
of the party and amongst senior party officials, rather than at the request of
the membership.
THE ‘STATESMAN’
One of the most notable characteristics of all these reviews is that they have
been conducted (and authored) by very senior figures within each of the
parties, which have served to (partially) depoliticize their findings. Announ-
cing the NSW Liberal Party Review to the Party’s State Council in November
2013, former prime minister Tony Abbott distanced himself from the reform
debate when he made the following remark: ‘I am so pleased and proud of the
willingness of our President . . . to put this whole question of preselection
reform and the democratisation of our Party into the hands of a group of
eminent Liberals’ (Abbott 2013). Taking great pains to highlight the contri-
bution of each individual, Abbott described the review panel in the following
terms, as:
some of the finest people our Party has ever produced. This process will be
guided by eminent people led by John Howard, assisted by the Hon.
David Kemp who has been so important in reforming our Party in
Victoria, assisted by Chris McDiven a former president of this division
and a former president of our party nationally, and assisted by someone
who has done more for our Party in NSW than just about anyone else, my
friend and colleague, Philip Ruddock. (Abbott 2013)
The idea of the statesman fits with Hall’s suggestion that institutional change
depends upon successfully fostering a series of institutional beliefs, schemas
that describe how ‘the adoption of new institutions will affect the likelihood of
achieving various types of goals’. Confidence in these changes can be garnered
by ‘communities of relevant experts and prior experience’ (Hall 2010: 208), a
description that applies to the party statesmen entrusted to undertake import-
ant organizational reviews.
As noted in the introduction to this chapter, party members are typically given
little attention in accounts of party change, predominantly because they are
either defined in rather vague terms—as party operatives—pitted against
other self-interested groups within the party, or because of the dominance of
elites in the process of reform, they have very limited agency. The prominence
of leaders and elites in reform debates does support the suggestion that
members have limited overt power in agitating for reform. However, as
discussed in Chapter 7, their role in the process of reform should not be
discounted. This role can be conceptualized in two ways: through the use of
members as a source of consultation in the process of undertaking, and
reporting on, internal organizational reviews. This consultation could take
place through, for example, membership surveys, soliciting written feedback
and focus groups. The second role lies in how the concept of membership—
and the rights and responsibilities associated with it—is invoked as a justifi-
cation for reform. In this way, an analysis of the role of party members in the
reform process can be extended to how membership is conceptualized by a
range of actors within the party, including how it reflects the nature of the
modern party organization.
The second reason why the role of members tends to be regarded as
marginal in studies of reform reflects the fact that ‘members’ can be concep-
tualized, and can organize, in a number of different ways. The efforts of the
rank-and-file can be individual, or more commonly and effectively, members
can organize in a collective way to agitate for change through intra-party
160 Party Reform
pressure groups. This section of the chapter provides a brief analysis of the
active role of party members in agitating for organizational reform, examin-
ing in particular the relationship of grassroots activists with the ‘official’
review process. Two contrasting cases are discussed: the work of intra-
party groups Local Labor and Open Labor in advocating for the imple-
mentation of the 2010 ALP National Review and the more disparate
activities of ‘pro-plebiscite’ activists in the NSW Liberal Party. However,
examples of similar pressure groups can be found in the UK with Labour
First and the Tory Reform group, although the activities of the latter
have become more subdued in the period since the Conservatives have
taken government. Progress, which describes itself as an independent
organization of over 2,000 UK Labour Party members, was a vocal
contributor to the Collins Review reform debate, consulting its member-
ship in the process of preparing a detailed submission to the review,
arguing strongly for the introduction of primaries for candidate selection
and all member votes, rather than electoral colleges, for internal party
positions (Progress 2013: 5).
The ALP is strongest when all of our members are well informed, equally
valued and genuinely encouraged to participate in party decision-making,
pre-selections and policy development. Labor governments have dedi-
cated themselves to the principle of one vote, one value and have built
and defended Australia’s transparent electoral system. The same must be
true of the ALP itself. (Local Labor 2015c)
CONCLUSION
The main argument of this chapter is that when we think about reform
debates, and who is driving the process, it is not simply a question of party
members versus elites. Moving beyond this dichotomy, the chapter has shown
that debates are played out in much wider circles—in the media, within think
tanks, and promulgated by those who have moved on from public life, or
occupy a backbench position, but still maintain an active interest in questions
of party organization. While the analysis in this chapter has supported previ-
ous accounts of the importance of the party leader in driving change, the way
The Protagonists of Party Reform 167
he/she is able to do this is a crucial part of the explanation. Leaders occupy a
prominent position in the public eye, and are an authoritative force in the
party organization. Yet in the process of reform, these institutional features
are also mediated by personal characteristics and particular political cir-
cumstances. What was common across all of the main protagonists for
reform was a willingness to advocate for change not only within, but also
beyond the party organization, through media outlets and in various public
forums. It therefore appears that not only the substance of organizational
change, but also the process through which it is achieved, is now blurring
the distinction between the internal affairs of the party and what is in the
public domain.
NOTES
1. See, for example, Chiru et al. (2015: 47), Wauters (2014), and Barnea and Rahat
(2007: 387). Note, however, that Bille (1997) was unable to prove any correlation
between party leadership and organizational change in the Danish Social
Democrats. His findings demonstrated that the modest changes to the party that
occurred since 1960 ‘took place gradually, mostly in periods where the party
leadership was stable and under no pressure to change’ (1997: 388).
2. For example, the Sydney Morning Herald ran with the heading ‘Bill Shorten’s
plans to democratise Labor’ (14 April 2014), the Australian went with ‘Prime
Minister Julia Gillard outlines Labor Party vision’ (16 September 2011), and the
Guardian carried the heading ‘Ed Miliband’s plan to reform Labour’s link with the
unions’ (9 July 2013). All articles framed the party leader as the driving force
behind the reforms.
3. See Chapter 7.
4. Financial Review, 10 July 2013.
5. Quoted in the Sunday Telegraph, 27 November 2011.
6. Quoted in the Sunday Telegraph, 27 November 2011.
7. Quoted in the Australian, 28 November 2011, p. 4.
8. Australian, 29 November 2011, p. 2; Age, 2 December 2011, p. 2.
9. Quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, 19–20 November 2011, p. 5.
10. Quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, 30 May 2015. NSW Legislative Assembly
Hansard and Papers, Tuesday, 5 May 2015.
11. Nick Reece, PM ABC Radio, 16 February 2010. Interestingly, credit for the trial
was claimed by premier John Brumby: ‘It’s just a suggestion I’ve made that could
be considered, it’s a way of potentially breathing, I think, new life into democracy,
new life into politics’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 2009).
12. Quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, 19–20 November 2011, pp. 4–5.
13. See, for example, the special issue of Party Politics on democratizing candidate
selection: 7(3) (2001).
168 Party Reform
14. Party reform is one of Open Labor’s projects, which also include new forms of
political organizing, economic policy, asylum seeker policy, and climate change
(Open Labor 2015).
15. An archived version of the statements of support for primaries and the range of
publications written in connection with the campaign can be found online: <http://
www.progressonline.org.uk/campaigns/prime-time/publications/> (accessed 29
October 2015).
16. Michael Baume, ‘Drowning in a sea of factional self-interests’, Spectator, 16
August 2014.
17. Gabrielle Chan, ‘Liberal party member threatened with suspension for NSW
reform crusade’, Guardian, 4 October 2013.
18. Christian Kerr, ‘Liberal survey on plebiscites “manipulated” ’, Australian, 3 April
2014.
19. Sydney Morning Herald, 8 September 2015, ABC News 7.30 Report, 26 October
2015.
20. ‘After the MPs’ expenses turmoil: Seven ways to bring about change’, Times, 21 May.
21. The Institute for Government describes itself as the ‘UK’s leading independent
charity and think tank promoting more effective government. We work with
political parties and senior civil servants, providing fresh thinking through
research, events and leadership development’ (IFG 2015).
9
This book began with the observation that although party change in of itself is
not a new phenomenon, the decline in party membership has become so
pervasive across advanced industrial democracies that is has created what
many parties now see as a critical juncture in their organizational trajectories:
they must either reform or perish. In the last decade, parties in Australia, the
United Kingdom, Germany, and New Zealand, among others, have under-
taken a flurry of high-profile public reform activities designed to increase
participation in, and engagement with, their organizations. While some of
these reforms seek to enhance the role of members in intra-party decision
making, many reforms also aim to extend participatory opportunities to those
traditionally defined as outside the party organization—for example, non-
members, voters, and partisan supporters.
Building on the evidence assembled as to how and why party reform occurs,
this chapter examines several of the possible consequences of such reforms,
and the challenges for party organizations moving into the future. After
providing a brief summary of the key findings of the research, the overall
trajectory of reform in relation to the role of political parties as participatory
and representative institutions in modern democracies is discussed. Several
main themes, or consequences, of reform are explored. The chapter analyses
some of the fundamental challenges and tensions that arise when more
inclusive modes of participation are mapped onto existing, and traditionally
relatively closed, party organizations—focusing specifically on supporters’
networks and community-organizing initiatives. The chapter then considers
whether party reforms have accurately responded to citizens’ contemporary
preferences for political participation. Finally, it examines the type of party
organization that is emerging as a result.
Source: LabOur Commission, ‘Survey of party members current and lapsed, 1–6 June 2006’, reported in Gauja
(2013: 109). N = 670 (current members only).
supporters’ network was a good way of drawing people into the party, a
sizeable minority (32 per cent) felt that the supporters’ network was a prece-
dent that might undermine the point of party membership. This reticence
carried through to members’ opinions of the rights that supporters should
carry within the organization (Table 9.1).
Over half the members surveyed felt that supporters should not have any
rights at all—a sentiment that was most pronounced amongst the party’s
activist left. Of the different activities canvassed, members were most willing
to cede some power over policy development, but were strongly opposed to
non-members playing a role in candidate and leadership selection. These
findings are particularly interesting in hindsight given that by virtue of the
2014 Building a One Nation Labour Party reforms, registered supporters now
have an equal say to party members in selecting the parliamentary leader
(discussed further below).
Similar attitudes to party supporters were also held by members of the
German Social Democratic Party in a survey administered to local and dis-
trict/sub-district associations in 2009 as part of the party’s organizational
reform process. In response to the question ‘should these forms of participation
also be opened up to non-members?’ (reported in Totz 2011: 12), the majority
of respondent groups were happy to see supporters surveyed on substantive
policy propositions, but were reluctant to grant them formal decision-making
powers on policy issues and in the selection of candidates (Table 9.2).
Although it is not one of the party types covered in this book, it is also
interesting to note that a 2012 survey of Australian Greens party members
found very similar attitudes to the integration of non-member participants.
176 Party Reform
T A B L E 9 . 2 German Social Democrats’ associational attitudes
to non-member participation (percentage of respondents)
Source: Totz (2011: 12). The percentages reported here are an average of the local and district/sub-district
associational results reported by Totz. N = approximately 3,960 local associations and 224 district/sub-district
associations (Totz 2011: 10–11).
Whilst 77 per cent of members felt that a supporters’ network was a good
way of drawing people into the party, the majority of members disagreed with
the propositions that supporters should have a role in deciding policy (62
per cent), choosing candidates (71 per cent), or participating in the selection of
the party leader (75 per cent) (Gauja and Jackson 2015: 15).
The evidence presented here indicates a strong reluctance, on the part of party
members, to cede decision-making influence to a larger group of partisan
supporters. Whilst members welcome the idea of supporters’ networks in prin-
ciple, there is a real possibility that the creation of these looser forms of affiliation
may further reduce financial membership, particularly if participation in import-
ant activities such as leadership selection is the prerogative of both groups. In
this scenario, supporters may supplant members as the party ‘base’ of the future.
Adapting the principles of community organizing is another prominent way
in which political parties in Australia and the United Kingdom have attempted
to strike a balance between member and non-member participation. Although
these are not necessarily new techniques (see Scarrow 1994), they have been the
subject of intense and renewed interest following the perceived mobilization
and fundraising success of the Obama presidential campaign in the US.
Community-organizing initiatives are characterized by their focus on local
communities and issues. In the United Kingdom, for example, the UK Labour
Party had advocated these initiatives as examples of ‘best practice’ amongst its
local groups. The Folkestone local branch led one of these local campaigns
against parking charges in the town centre. Starting with an online petition, the
campaign spread to an offline petition in the high street that collected 2,000
signatures, progressed to a series of community meetings, and culminated in a
local council referendum. Lauded by the party, the campaign was able to
successfully reinvigorate the local branch, as members
had a focus. Each week we would get ready to give a speech at a meeting,
or prepare for a radio interview, or print more posters for the campaign . . .
We found a new energy in the local party, with new members taking the
lead in campaigns and long standing members finding a new lease of life.
(UK Labour Party 2013e)
Challenges and Consequences of Party Reform 177
Not only was participation within the party renewed at the local level, but the
campaign also succeeded in bringing the Labour Party into the public view
and integrating supporters as ‘for the first time, we became part of the
community and built bridges with other groups that were working for the
best interests of the town’ (UK Labour Party 2013e).
Translating this model of organizing and participation to a national scale,
in the context of election campaigning, has proved to be less successful
for the UK Labour Party. One of the fundamental tensions inherent in the
community-organizing model of partisan politics is between the decentraliza-
tion and autonomy of decision making practised by volunteers and local
groups and the desire of the party organization to maintain control of groups,
processes, and policy agendas. As Schutz and Sandy (2011: 22) argue,
Organizing is not about doing for others. Instead, organizers are supposed
to work with people to produce social change. A key tenet of organizing is
that those affected by a particular social problem are usually best equipped
to figure out what changes are most likely to make a real difference.
N = 1230
The results of the survey are presented in Table 9.3 and the items have been
tabled in an inverse relationship to the popularity of the response. Because the
survey asked participants about their likely—rather than actual—political
behaviour, overall rates of participation are likely to be marginally inflated.
However, a number of interesting trends emerge amongst the various engage-
ment items. Unsurprisingly, joining a party is the least popular method of
engagement among respondents, with only 9 per cent indicating that they
would be likely to do so in the future. By contrast, respondents were twice
as likely to register as a supporter, although the total percentage was still only
18 per cent. A majority of survey respondents (64 per cent) were likely to
engage in only one partisan activity in the future—answering a survey from a
political party about issues that mattered to them. General interest in partici-
pating in primaries (17 per cent) and receiving information from a party
(21 per cent) was also low. Around one third of survey participants expressed
interest in engaging with parties by posting a comment on a party website
(29 per cent) and attending a policy forum (33 per cent).
Some internal polling data from the Australian Labor Party examining the
benefits of the ‘community pre-selection’ trials it held in 2014 is also worth
reporting here. Surveys were administered to those who had voted in two of the
five trial seats—Newtown and Balmain, which are both Sydney inner-city
electorates.3 Because the survey was designed primarily for internal party
assessments and as a way to ‘touch base’ with participants, most questions
have limited scholarly utility. Nevertheless, two questions asked, ‘Why did you
vote?’ and ‘How might you be involved in the future’, provide further inter-
esting insights into the relationship between organizational reforms and innov-
ations within political parties and the participatory preferences of citizens.
The motivations for voting in a community pre-selection are reported in
Table 9.4. The first point to note is the relative insignificance of policy issues
Challenges and Consequences of Party Reform 181
T A B L E 9 . 4 Reasons for voting in the ALP ‘community pre-selection’ (percentage of respondents)
The relationship between political parties and their members and sup-
porters, as well as the relationship between the demands for political
participation and the opportunities provided, are both symbiotic. As Fau-
cher (2015b: 413) has argued, in many cases the two cannot be separated,
as ‘when parties have focused on recruiting a specific type of member they
have actually contributed to transform what party membership meant’.
This observation raises the second of the two questions posed at the
beginning of the previous section—notwithstanding the accuracy of parties’
organizational reform processes, are they appropriate? And what kind of
party will they produce in the future? What do they say of the future
of party democracy?
Challenges and Consequences of Party Reform 183
One point of contention, which is perhaps the most prominent debate in
party organizational scholarship, is whether reforms that seek to ‘democra-
tize’ the party—most frequently through ballots and other variants of indi-
vidualized direct democracy—appear to enfranchise, but at the same time
disempower, committed party members and activists (see, for example, Katz
2001: 293). Although the logic is persuasive—enrolling and providing
decision-making rights to moderate and ‘marginally committed’ members or
supporters might drown out the voice of the activists (Katz and Mair 2009:
759; see also Barnea and Rahat 2007: 386), the argument—insofar as it hinges
on motivation—is difficult to empirically prove and in recent years the debate
has reached somewhat of a stalemate.
Moving beyond this particular ‘conspiratorial’ construction of the debate
on the impact of reform, perhaps the most fundamental question that we as
party scholars need to grapple with is whether these recent reforms, which
ostensibly seek to strengthen the representative and participatory link
between citizens and the state, might actually damage party democracy. The
book has highlighted many of the theoretical and empirical tensions that are
associated with an increasingly open party organization, but at its heart the
debate revolves around the inherently normative—and contested—notions of
what ‘party democracy’ is, and what it ought to look like.
One of the most prominent themes that has emerged throughout the book is
the reluctance of political parties, in the way in which they describe and justify
their reforms, to depart from the modern party as anything but a membership
organization. At the same time, however, the concept of membership itself has
also been evolving in several important ways, which all tend to blur the
distinction, in practice, of the boundaries of the party organization—through
the introduction of alternate forms of affiliation (such as supporters), granting
decision-making rights to non-members, policy consultations with the
broader public, and the appropriation of issues, rather than ideologically
based community politics campaigns. In this way, political parties can still
maintain their status as ‘membership organizations’, and benefit from the
legitimacy and resource benefits that accrue from a base of supporters, but the
nature of the organizational link that members create changes as a result. As
Bimber et al. (2012: 6) have suggested, ‘organizations in civil society are not
dying wholesale or becoming obsolete’. While they struggle to adapt, the end
result ‘will not be the end of the organization in civic life but rather its
transformation, especially with respect to the meaning and role of citizens
and the forms of their involvement’.
Chapter 5 placed these developments in the broader context of a more
individualized society. As illustrated by the survey evidence presented in the
previous section, whilst a significant minority of citizens indicate that they
will engage with political parties through new channels of participation in
the future, there is no guarantee that the party supporter will become a
184 Party Reform
sustained—or an active—follower in the future. Indeed, the very nature of the
reforms to decision-making processes around key party functions presume
that individuals will ‘dip in’ and ‘dip out’ of engagement as it suits them. On
the one hand, these new individualized links and intermittent participatory
practices are not so different from patterns of membership participation that
have characterized political parties in the past (Scarrow 2015: 209). Com-
parative studies have shown that the majority of party members are, for the
most part, inactive. This has remained a relatively constant trend even after
party members have demanded, and been given, greater participatory oppor-
tunities (Gauja and van Haute 2015: 197). Further, recent work comparing
the political activities and socio-economic profiles of party members and
supporters has suggested these two groups are actually quite similar (Gauja
and Jackson 2015). In practice, therefore, a party comprised of supporter-
members rather than member-supporters may not look all that different from
the status quo.
On the other hand, however, Faucher (2015b: 421) warns that ‘when parties
focus on issues at the expense of building a collective identity, they may
inadvertently contribute to the very problem they seek to solve: demobilisa-
tion’. Indeed, the rise of new political parties on the far left and right of the
political spectrum and the mass mobilization of citizens in democracies such
as Greece and Spain in response to the global economic crisis and migration
flows have demonstrated the continuing importance of class, inequality, and
economic cleavages. For social democratic parties in particular, the strategy
of dismantling collective identities and affiliation to concentrate on individ-
ual, issues-based engagement may have underestimated the continuing rele-
vance of these issues—and in the process left a large group of disaffected
citizens by the wayside.
To provide some final thoughts on these issues and on the consequences of
party reform, it seems appropriate to return to the reforms of the UK Labour
Party leadership-selection process that were developed and advocated by Ray
Collins and Ed Miliband in 2013–14, and introduced in Chapter 1 of this
book. Two key messages were delivered when the reforms were announced:
‘parties need to reach out far beyond their membership’ and the ‘need to
change the party so that we are in a better position to change the country’ (see
p. 2). Were these reforms successful in achieving these goals? Were they able
to reconcile the demand for new participatory opportunities with existing
party structures?
The new process for selecting the party leader was used for the first time
following the resignation of Ed Miliband in May 2015, after the party’s
general election defeat. Four candidates contested the leadership position:
Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper, and ‘dark horse’ candidate,
Jeremy Corbyn. Overall, 422,664 people voted in the Labour leadership
election, comprising of 245,520 members, 105,598 registered supporters, and
Challenges and Consequences of Party Reform 185
71,546 trade union affiliates. Corbyn was elected with 60 per cent of the
overall vote. As a measure of attracting support for the party, increasing
membership, and by implication responding to a desire for new opportunities
for partisan engagement, the reforms appear at face value to have been highly
successful. At the end of December 2013, the party’s membership stood at
190,000. In October 2015, financial membership was over 360,000.4
The leadership contest also provides several insights into the consequences
of ‘reaching out beyond the membership’. The process attracted significant
controversy when Telegraph readers were encouraged to join the Labour
Party as registered supporters to vote for Corbyn, in order to ‘consign Labour
to electoral oblivion’.5 Amongst allegations of ‘entryism’, several high-profile
Labour figures, such as Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, and David Miliband
intervened during the contest to urge voters not to vote for Corbyn.6 Editori-
alizing in the Observer, Tony Blair commented that ‘the Corbyn thing is part
of a trend . . . There is a politics of parallel reality going on, in which reason is
an irritation, evidence a distraction, emotional impact is king and the only
thing that counts is feeling good about it all’.7
In light of the influx of members and supporters to the UK Labour Party,
there was significant conjecture during the campaign, and debate has ensued
after the contest, as to whether Corbyn actually represents the party’s support
base, or is the choice of a vocal minority of activists. Corbyn is regarded by
many senior political figures as a radical democratic socialist, holding policy
ideas that are dangerous for the party and for Britain as a whole. Others see
the election of Corbyn as a breath of fresh air, and a real shift in engaging
people in party politics. It has been described as ‘a democratic explosion
unprecedented in British politics’, and a ‘spontaneous campaign that erupted
out of nowhere, powered by grassroots volunteers across the country’.8 Ray
Collins’ suggestion at the 2013 Labour Party conference—that we need to
change the party ‘so that we are in a better position to change the country’—
has particular resonance here, though perhaps not in the way that the archi-
tects of the reforms intended.
A survey of eligible voters conducted in the month before the contest for the
Labour leadership closed indicated that the highest level of support for
Corbyn was amongst affiliated union members, followed by registered sup-
porters and then party members. Amongst the membership, those most likely
to vote for Corbyn were members who had signed up after the 2015 general
election, compared to those individuals who had become a member before Ed
Miliband’s time as leader (YouGov 2015).9 In the final poll, support for
Corbyn was highest amongst registered supporters (84 per cent), followed
by trade union supporters (58 per cent), and finally party members (50 per
cent) (UK Labour Party 2015b). Together, what these voting patterns suggest
is that the outcome of the contest was influenced in large part by those who
joined in the months leading up to the vote (either as members or supporters),
186 Party Reform
rather than by long-standing party members. However, it does not necessarily
follow that activists were disenfranchised as a result, or that the outcome
produced an ‘unrepresentative’ or ‘undemocratic’ result. In the week follow-
ing Corbyn’s election, a further 50,000 people joined the Labour Party.10
What is does indicate, however, is that even within individualized party
structures, groups can still find ways to mobilize collectively to achieve
influence but that they must work creatively to reach larger numbers of
citizens. If the Labour leadership’s intention was to silence activists in a sea
of ‘moderate’ voices by opening up and democratizing the party, they may
have received more than they bargained for.
One of the fundamental questions that was posed at the outset of the book
was whether, in a climate of membership decline, party reforms are designed
to reinvigorate the normative ideals of the mass party model of representa-
tion, or whether the breakdown of membership (coupled with social change)
has created a climate conducive to reforms that might fundamentally alter the
way in which parties connect citizens and the state. While the UK Labour
leadership example and many others discussed throughout the book suggest
that parties continue to hedge their bets by appealing to both traditional
organizational structures and new participatory processes, once reforms that
seek to ‘open up’ the party in various ways have been implemented, it is very
hard to turn back. At the same time, as party reforms aim to respond to a new
breed of political citizen, the high-profile campaigns associated with primar-
ies, policy consultations, supporters’ networks, etc. work to potentially create
a new set of normative ideals and change citizens’ expectations of how they
might associate with parties. The consequences of party reform therefore
extend well beyond the parameters associated with traditional accounts of
party change.
NOTES
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Index