The territorial Conservative Party

Devolution and party change in Scotland and Wales

Alan Convery

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784991319
• eBook ISBN: 9781526100542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How did the territorial Conservative Party adapt to devolution? This detailed analysis of the Scottish and Welsh Conservative Parties explains how they moved from campaigning against devolution to sitting in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. Tracing the processes of party change in both parties this study explains why the Welsh Conservatives unexpectedly embraced devolution while the Scottish Conservatives took much longer to accept that Westminster was no longer the priority. This book will be of interest to students of British, Scottish and Welsh politics and anyone who is interested in the Conservative Party. It also speaks to wider debates about the nature of devolution, party change and multi-level governance.

Part I

Theory and context

1

When and why do political parties change?

This chapter sets out an analytical framework to compare the Scottish and Welsh Conservative parties. They are two branches of a statewide political party that confront the challenges of dealing with multi-level politics. This chapter considers what we know about change in political parties and places a particular emphasis on the factors that affect parties at the sub-state level. Taking Harmel and Janda’s (1994) model of national party change as its starting point, it outlines a framework to analyse sub-state party change. Two broad sections cover the drivers (why?) of party change and the manifestations (how?) of party change.

However, whilst isolating these different factors provides a common framework for analysis, we must be conscious of the fact that explanations for party change cannot be so neatly packaged. Party change (or stasis) in the real world is the result of a complicated series of interactions among institutions, ideas and people. In particular, a split between drivers and manifestations is inherently artificial. Party change cannot be easily broken down into dependent and independent variables. Changes in personnel, for instance, could be considered as both a driver and a manifestation of party change. Therefore, having used these headings to draw out and compare similar processes in both parties, I come back in Chapter 5 to draw the analysis together.

What drives party change?

In complex organisations like political parties, defining and measuring change is difficult (Mair, 1989). It involves an element of subjectivity, both in terms of what constitutes change in the first place, and perhaps more so in evaluating how significant that change is. For some parties, involving party membership in a leadership election could be a banal and evolutionary development; for others, it might represent something of a revolution. Moreover, party elites themselves may perceive changes to be more significant than they appear to an outside observer, particularly if they have been involved in implementing them.

Harmel and Janda (1994) provide a systematic framework for analysing party change and this has been applied to several case studies. However, like much parties research and theorising it deals only with change at the national level (Deschouwer, 2005; Fabre and Swenden, 2013; Jeffery and Schakel, 2013). In order to address the research questions of this study, it is adapted and refined to make it sensitive to the concerns of parties like the Scottish and Welsh Conservatives that operate at the sub-state level but nevertheless retain a link to the statewide party system.

Therefore, we will discuss in turn several possible causes of party change: change in party leadership; change in a party’s dominant faction; the external shock of electoral defeat; the effects of electoral competition at the sub-state level; and changes in public opinion. Crucially, this study agrees with Harmel and Janda (1994: 262) that party changes do not ‘just happen’. Clearly, changes in a party’s environment may encourage party change. However, these do not in themselves passively cause parties to change. Instead, changes in a party’s environment must be consciously absorbed by party elites in order to bring about change in political parties. Parties may choose not to change at all in response to changes in the society or institutions in which they operate. It is possible for parties to react in entirely different ways to the same environmental changes. They need not all follow strictly functional pressures (Fabre, 2008; Bratberg, 2009; Swenden and Maddens, 2009).

Thus, for Deschouwer (1992: 17), ‘“perception” is the intermediate variable that has to be placed between objective facts and the reactions of the parties’. Similarly, for Wilson (1994: 264), ‘parties are not simply passive recipients of pressures from their socioeconomic, cultural, institutional and competitive environment’. It is therefore also the case that parties might change as a result of internal shifts that are unrelated to their outside environment (Panebianco, 1988: 241–242).

Leadership change

The Scottish and Welsh Conservative parties have each had three different post-devolution leaders. However, the evidence on the impact of leadership change on party change is mixed. Harmel et al. (1995: 6) hypothesise that: ‘Leadership change is associated with party change, even with all possible direct effects of poor electoral performance (and resulting leadership changes) already removed.’ Thus it is ‘a sufficient, though not necessary, condition for party change’. Leaders are central interpreters of the reasons for poor election results and are often the instigators of organisational or programmatic reform. Their assessment of whether reform is necessary and their attempts to block it may have a significant impact on the scope for change. As Wilson (1994: 264) points out: ‘party leaders and reformers as the key intervening variable that determines whether or not parties will, in fact, respond to any of these factors that make transformation possible or desirable’. Moreover, as Harmel et al. (1995: 4) note: ‘Different leaders will assess things differently; different leaders have different abilities with which to develop and implement changes when they do want them.’ Leaders with an electoral mandate for change from the party membership may be in an especially powerful position to drive through party change.

However, the impact of leadership change on party change will be affected by the structure and culture of different political parties. For instance, in the highly centralised and office-seeking UK Conservative Party, a high degree of autonomy is given to the party leadership. A new leader therefore has considerable scope to radically alter strategy and policy positions without the express permission of party members or officials (Bale, 2010: 17). During the coalition negotiations in 2010, William Hague observed that the Conservative Party ‘is an absolute monarchy but this is qualified by regicide’ (quoted in Laws, 2010: 102).

Leadership change in a party that prizes internal democracy may not have as much impact. Thus, Harmel et al. (1995: 7) hypothesise that: ‘The relationship between leadership changes and party change is stronger for parties with strong leadership structures than for parties with severely limited leaders.’ In contrast, in parties where the membership exercise strong oversight and control over the party leadership, it might be expected that change is less likely because the leadership has to a much greater extent to ensure they take the party members with them (Samuels, 2004: 1020).

Harmel et al.’s (1995: 12–14) cross-national data of six parties for the period 1950–1990 largely supports both hypotheses. Party change usually follows leadership change and this effect is most pronounced in parties (like the German CDU and the British Conservative Party) that have strong leadership structures. The effect is smaller in more decentralised parties like the German SPD and the British Labour Party. More recently, Schumacher et al. (2013) find that parties that are controlled mainly by the leadership tend to respond to changes in the mean voter’s position, whereas parties with much more internal democracy tend to follow their own voters. Meyer’s (2013: 154) study of policy shifts in parties in ten European countries concludes that ‘although voters are more likely to accept party policy shifts of newly elected leaders, leadership changes do not lead to larger party policy shifts’.

More in-depth case studies have generated further mixed evidence about the impact of party leadership changes. Müller (1997) finds that changes in leadership were the driving force behind changes in the Austrian Socialist Party’s campaigning techniques. Indeed, alongside electoral defeats and changes in dominant factions, ‘leadership change must be considered as the single most important factor’ (Müller, 1997: 309). However, Bille (1997) finds that in the Danish Social Democratic Party, changes of leadership tended to facilitate programmatic changes already in motion, rather than be the drivers of those changes themselves. It may also be that changes in leadership have much more slow-burning consequences for political parties. In the rather unwieldy structures of the German CDU, Clemens (2009) finds that the impact of Angela Merkel’s leadership was a long process, rather than a single event.

In multi-level parties like the UK Conservative Party, it is likely that there will be tensions between the national and regional party leaderships, particularly over issues like autonomy and candidate selection (Hopkin, 2003). Where leaderships at both levels are in agreement about organisational or programmatic change, then this change is more likely. Where there is significant disagreement (if, for instance, leaders at different levels come from different party factions), then the resulting arguments may make party change more difficult.

The effect of leadership change on party change is therefore mixed (Fagerholm, 2015: 3), but we may tentatively say that party leaders are in a strong position to drive change when they have the institutional resources to do so (in terms of a mandate, a culture of hierarchy or a perceived legitimacy) or if they move with the grain of the party membership who share an analysis of the problems that need to be solved (Panebianco, 1988: 246). Both Meyer (2013: 204) and Schumacher et al. (2013) find that party leaders with strong organisations can more easily change their policy platform. However, party change may not follow leadership change simply because the leaders who take over do not believe it is required or because they are simply not dominant enough to impose it (see, for instance, Fell, 2009).

Change in dominant faction: factions at both levels

Parties are coalitions of interests and factions. As Katz and Mair (1993: 6) emphasise:

a party itself is a political system. Within each of the three faces of party organization [voluntary, governing and bureaucratic], politics is endlessly played out, with different coalitions of forces and actors striving for dominance. Politics is clearly part of the interactions of all three faces, reflecting the tensions that underlie their various interrelationships, as well as the struggle for relative influence within the organization tout court.

Such factional tensions are played out, for instance, in the UK Labour Party in the split between Blairite and Brownite groups, and in the Liberal Democrats between ‘Orange Book’ liberals and more left-wing social democrats. If there is such strong disagreement between factions about the future direction of a political party, then the replacement in leadership positions or dominance of one faction...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Theory and context
• Part II Scotland and Wales
• Part III Conclusion
• References
• Index