Political Parties and Power: A New Framework for Analysis
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12143 |
| Author | Danny Rye |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political Parties and Power: A New Framework
for Analysis
Danny Rye
Birkbeck College, University of London
Political parties are both vehicles for the pursuit of power and specific sites in which it is produced, organised, fought
over, captured and lost. However, the literature on parties has not kept up with theoretical developments and largely
lacks an explicit, systematic theorisation of power. To address this, a framework of power is proposed in this article
that introduces some of the more nuanced and sophisticated insights of political theory to the analysis of parties
without dismissing the benefits of more established approaches. Power is approached as a rich, multilayered concept,
derived from diverse intellectual traditions. The framework acts as a heuristic which encapsulates individual agency,
the strategic mobilisation of rules and norms, rationalisation and bureaucracy, the constitution of agents and the
micro-level discipline of bodies. This provides a more satisfying framework for analysing power in parties than has
previously been offered.
Keywords: power; political parties; organisation
Despite question marks over their continuing role as a linkage mechanism between the
public and institutions of government (Biezen et al., 2012; Webb, 2009, p. 272), political
parties remain important subjects of political analysis because they still perform vital
functions in a relatively efficient way (Dalton et al., 2011, p. 216). They are still the main
means by which governments are formed, preferences are articulated and political activity
is mobilised (White and Ypi, 2010). Indeed, most studies of political parties have focused
on these functional roles: articulating and aggregating interests (Ware 1996), mobilising and
integrating populations (Duverger, 1959), facilitating popular choice and control (Webb,
2009) and recruiting candidates and elites, not to mention organising both government and
opposition (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000). However, this focus means that an obvious,
and perhaps the most interesting, question about modern political parties is too easily
overlooked: What is their relationship with power? Parties are, after all, primarily vehicles
for the pursuit of political power (Beyme, 1985, p. 73), but crucially they are also entities
within which the internal struggle for power is fundamental. This is something that has
long been recognised in the literature from the fatalistic logic of oligarchy that Robert
Michels (1962[1915]) elaborated, to Angelo Panebianco’s (1988) notion of an ‘unequal
exchange relation’ between leaders and led, and Richard Katz and Peter Mair’s (1995)
‘stratarchy’, which describes a near autonomous relationship between the two.
However, references to power are more often oblique or go unexplained, at best a
backdrop or assumption secondary to the consideration of functions. The explicit con-
ceptual development of power in party settings is distinctly lacking. Furthermore, even
those that do address power more directly expose the growing gap between empirical
political science and political theory, with the sub-literature on party discipline being a
good example. One key strand – including Shaun Bowler (2002), Knut Heidar and
bs_bs_banner
doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12143
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2015 VOL 63, 1052–1069
© 2014 The Author. Political Studies © 2014 Political Studies Association
Ruud Koole (2000) and Louise Davidson-Schmich (2006) – sees leadership power as
contingent and dependent on the effective deployment of institutional resources to limit
the power of members. In a second strand, John Owens (2006), Reuven Hazan (2006)
and Torben Jensen (2000) seek alternative explanations and recognise that party loyalty
in an age of declining formal participation cannot be explained only by force and
submissiveness but also by the values and common ideas that people share. This points
tantalisingly towards a more structural and constitutive mode of power, but it is not fully
recognised as such (at best these are recognised as conditions for the exercise of a more
limited kind of power) and so never fully developed. More recent developments in
theory about power have frequently been overlooked. While theorists including Stewart
Clegg (1989) and Mark Haugaard (2003; 2012) have developed increasingly rich,
complex and sophisticated analyses of power drawing on the insights of Michel Fou-
cault, Anthony Giddens and others, the party literature has remained focused on fairly
traditional readings of the relationship between ‘leaders’ and ‘led’, behaviouralist notions
of individual conduct or elite-oriented models.
Why should we be concerned about this? We should be concerned because the
structures and relations of power in parties, how they affect members, leaders and activists,
are crucial to their ongoing health and vitality. The modern ‘catch-all’ party, with its
weaker, more pragmatic, electorate-oriented ideology may have downgraded the role of
members (Kirchheimer, 1966), reinforced by increasing professionalism in media and
communications (Lees-Marshment, 2001), but it cannot quite do without them. It still
needs them to maintain organisation, its presence on the ground, to run local election
campaigns (Denver et al., 2004), select candidates for Parliament and local government, and
provide it with legitimising democratic credentials (Seyd and Whiteley, 2004). Parties must
therefore find ways of attracting members and active supporters by making participation
meaningful while, at the same time, making the best possible use of them to disseminate
political messages. The importance of this has clearly been recognised by some politicians
– for example, both Peter Hain, a former Labour cabinet minister, and Douglas Carswell,
a Conservative backbench MP, have argued that their respective parties’ fortunes can be
revived by redefining the relationship between supporters, members and party elites.
Indeed, the signs are that parties are increasingly seeking to blur the distinction between
‘formal’ members and less formal supporters (Young, 2013) in the hope of reviving
participation.
Despite such developments, the problem for many parties is that they simply haven’t
adapted to the changing social and political landscape. Their structures and organisation are
products of a bygone age when they were not only political machines, but the centre of
social life in many communities (Conservative Clubs and Working Men’s Clubs, for
example) and – especially in Labour’s case – of working lives, too. As this social role has
diminished (Webb, 2000, p. 226), so too has the articulation of distinctive class interests
and thus the ability to mobilise (Scarrow et al., 2000). As a result, traditional notions of
command and discipline as a means of keeping members ‘in line’ have become less
relevant. Coercion may not be entirely redundant, but in modern consumer-oriented
societies, voluntary organisations such as parties need moresubtle methods to bring their
members into line in terms of conduct, style and message.
POLITICAL PARTIES AND POWER 1053
© 2014 The Author. Political Studies © 2014 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2015, 63(5)
To continue reading
Request your trial