Intra-party policy formulation in flux. Effects of organizational crises on party members' effective rights to impact policies in Western European parties (1980-2012)
Final Report Abstract
My research contributes to understanding and explaining members' involvement in party policy formulation in three ways. First, it contributes to the conceptualisation of policy formulation as a third pillar of intra-party democracy. To this end, I develop a two-dimensional map of policy-making that distinguishes two stages of policy formulation (agenda-setting and decision-making) and three types of party actors that are potentially involved (party elite, delegate bodies, ordinary members). Also, I argue and corroborate empirically that differences across both categories are systematically related to policy flexibility, on the one hand, and members' satisfaction, on the other hand. The stronger members impact both stages of the process, the lower is the degree of policy change. Furthermore, delegate bodies with decision-making rights constitute a stronger constraint on policy change than ordinary members. Second, my research maps variance of members' involvement in policy formulation from an empirical perspective both across cases and over time. It shows that reforms of policy formulation are far more diverse than common models of party change assume: Parties differ significantly with regard to the frequency and the substantive direction of related reforms. A comparison of the German Social Democratic Party, the British Labour Party and the British Conservative Party shows that even though most reforms have increased elites' power over policy, they have done so by very different means - either by shifting agenda-setting power from delegate bodies to the elite or by shifting decisionmaking and/or agenda-setting power from delegate bodies to ordinary members. My research thus reinforces the need to systematically study the causes of divergent reform trajectories. In addition, I show that while certain reforms displace one set of rules with another one, others characterize as layering processes where new rules are introduced on top of or alongside existing ones. Finally, at a descriptive level, my case studies show that negotiations over reform proposals often lead to package deals between the leadership and various intra-party groups that trade membership involvement in one pillar of intra-democracy against involvement in another. Third, my research develops a theoretical framework that models the causes of different reform trajectories and assesses its plausibility by means of comparative case studies. It yields three main findings in this regard: One, it shows that leaders take the trade-off between policy flexibility and member satisfaction into account when designing institutions of intra-party policy formulation. In cases where elites favour policy flexibility over members' satisfaction, they have directly shifted agenda-setting power from delegate bodies to the party elite. In contrast, in cases where elites perceived that both mechanisms are much needed and useful to counter organisational crisis, they have tried to kill two birds with one stone and have shifted powers from delegate bodies to ordinary members. Two, leaders value policy flexibility higher in times where electoral markets are highly volatile and where former dynamics of decision-making inside the party were conflictive, cumbersome and cost-intensive. In contrast, where public demand for participation is visible and elites confront a critical degree of membership loss, elites regard member satisfaction and participation as an equally important mechanism to regain organizational health. Three, time in opposition rather than electoral defeat seems to be the mother of organisational change and electoral victory serves as a midwife for institutional displacement. In contrast, opposition status and frequent changes of leadership foster strategies of institutional layering.
