Powellism, Thatcherism and the Conservative Party, 1945-87: the party as the site of ideological transition

2012-07-27This dissertation contends that the politics of ideology within political parties are crucial in determining the substance and early prospects for success of ideological challenges seeking to transform the state system in representative democracies. The focus of this dissertation is the politics of the party; that is to say, the objective of studying the wider conjuncture is to illuminate the often complex effects of intra-party politics on the state system, and vice versa. The politics of ideology within the party help to determine the timing, tactics and content of transitions in the state system. Moreover, the initial intra-party purchase of ideas may preclude transitions, in spite of sociological forces indicating such realignments to be viable. ❧ The dissertation presents a model of intra-party ideological transitions, periodized according to the institutional focus and strategic aims of challengers at three stages—referred to here as the challenge, the consolidation, and the ascendency. At each of these stages, the effects of ideas are ‘coupled’ with those of institutions at three levels—the high political, the grassroots, and among the wider electorate—and the interaction between them can be drawn out in narratives which map our model onto various cases. ❧ Owing to events and institutions outside the party and the huge internal variation between parties, each transition will be substantively unique and its constituent stages will differ in duration. Yet it is proposed that our model’s three stages are transferable analytically across ideological transitions in ‘establishment parties’—especially such parties that are physically large and ideologically diverse, but also smaller, more programmatic, parties, so long as their leaders subscribe to constitutional rules and they are ideationally linked through their core principles to the broader societal ideology. This second attribute separates the ‘establishment party’, which this dissertation concentrates exclusively on, from the merely constitutionalist party, for which certain of the model’s facets may potentially require revision. ❧ Three literatures which overlook the party as the initial site of transition in the process of political and ideological change are examined. Realignment theorists and their critics have traditionally concentrated on electoral churning, rather than on the social forces at work in driving ‘switchers’ into the opposing camp, or, to complicate matters further, the changing electoral ideologies expounded by parties, which may be a cause, an effect, or epiphenomenal to the realignment of voters. Even when political scientists do move beyond the surface and quantifiable symptoms of political change, it is argued that they neglect the vital ways in which the societal tectonics that precede and produce upheavals are mediated by the party-as-institution. ❧ Historical institutionalists, meanwhile, have made significant contributions to our understanding of political development and institutional functionality, but their analyses are limited in scope by an overly narrow focus on the central institutions of state. The role of political parties—the key link in civil society between what Andrew Gamble terms the ‘politics of power’ and the ‘politics of support’—as sites of ideological contestation, and therefore as integral elements of any wider conjunctural change, has been neglected. ❧ Though the few recent studies of parties as organizations have, by examining changes to party functions such as mobilization and fundraising, offered compelling accounts of long-term institutional change, they have, unfortunately, neglected the dynamic process through which ideas are promulgated within relatively static institutional settings in the short-term. ❧ This dissertation’s model of ideological transition takes the internal politics of the party as its point of reference, and is based on the following five assumptions or theoretical premises: 1) The party is the initial site of ideological development and contestation in parliamentary democracies, and we must look inside parties in order to understand larger changes in the state system. 2) The respective and relative effects of ideology and the institutional configuration of the party differ according to the stage of transition. 3) During each of these stages, the different levels of the party—modelled in this dissertation as the realm of high politics, the grassroots level, and the broader electorate—are involved in the process of ideological change to differing degrees. 4) Ideas are sold differently to the grassroots and, in turn, to the wider electorate, than they are among the parliamentary party. 5) The content of operational ideologies helps determine the success or failure of challenges—First, the core principles of a party’s ‘ideological seedbed’ frame the debate, set its terms, and limit the pool from which ideas can be drawn or recycled, and second, aside from the skill with which ideologies are sold, core principles must be operationalized into a package of policies which seems compelling in light of events. ❧ Building on the realignment synthesis, this dissertation offers an account of realignment writ large. During the initial stage of transition, the challenge, the aim of ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ is simply to win leadership of the party due to the political power afforded those occupying key posts. For a challenge to emerge, conjunctural crisis or disconnect between society and the state system must exist, along with a dominant faction or group within the party associated with the existing political economy. Once an alternative is operationalized from one or more principles from the party’s ideological seedbed, the success of challenges depends on four interconnected variables: the configuration of party institutions; the manner in which challengers conduct their campaign within this setting; the attraction of the challengers’ ideology vis-à-vis the electoral perspective of the old order; and the strength of the old order and its tactical decisions, including modification of its own operational ideology. ❧ In the subsequent consolidation and ascendency stages, the challengers must retain their newly-acquired hegemony within the party, sell their operational ideology to the electorate as an alternative to the status quo, and seek as far as possible to implement policy in line with their realigning project. The shift of attention away from the intra-party struggle—the assumption being that the challengers’ position becomes more secure as the transition progresses—and towards these later goals marks the boundary between the consolidation and ascendency stages. ❧ The current study applies this model to the case of the post-war Conservative Party. Chapter two discusses at length the content and operation of the Tory Party’s ‘secular Anglican’ seedbed, asserting that the party is not only constitutionally acquiescent, but also ideologically aware. The model is then mapped onto the two successful Conservative challenges of the post-war era: Middle Way Conservatism and Thatcherism, which displaced the former as the dominant Conservative ideology in the 1970s and 1980s. ❧ The bulk of the dissertation’s substantive sections concentrates on Enoch Powell’s failed challenges to Middle Way hegemony from 1963 to 1974. Since the attention of challengers is paid almost exclusively to the party during the challenge phase, this period has most relevance to the politics of ideology within the party—the central topic of this dissertation. ❧ Comparison with the Thatcherite transition allows for the systematic study of intra-party variables which, all other factors being equal, account for the almost total collapse of one challenge and the swift takeover of the party by another group just a decade later. Thus, the determining influence of the party-as-institution over the viability of ideological challenges is established. ❧ Finally, the external validity of the model and its concepts are discussed in relation to three historically quite different challenges: Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff reform campaign of 1903-6; the transformation of the Republican Party in the last quarter of the twentieth century in the United States; and the emergence of New Labour under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair in the 1990s. As our model is adapted to other transitions, one of the most important questions that must be asked is: What are the relationships between the levels of the party and how does interaction take place? Only then can we begin to understand the flow of ideas within the particular party being analyzed