Inner‐party reforms: The SPD and labour party in comparative perspective

Empowering the Members or Marketing the Party? The Conservative Reforms of 1998

“…These changes`were stimulated in no small part by election and campaign considerations, more speci®cally the question of how Labour could become a majority party again'. 7 This is congruent with the contention that intra-party democracy is essentially infeasible in practice. Judge highlights how`a fully democratised party is susceptible to central control.…”

Think Tanks in the United Kingdom and Germany: Actors in the Modernisation of Social Democracy

“…The SPD's party-internal programme-making structures are both stronger and more fragmented than Labour's and proved more resilient to attempts by party leaders to impose a particular discourse on the debate top-down by deploying external expertise. The SPD's persisting ‘loosely coupled anarchy’ of various independent organisational levels and of a diverse membership (Jun 1996; Lösche 1998) made it more difficult for the party leadership to embark on a modernisation course. Therefore, the party has been compared to a ‘sluggish tanker’ (Glotz 1982).…”

“…When Neil Kinnock took over the party leadership in 1983 he started making a ‘sustained effort ... to relocate Labour within the mainstream of European Social Democracy’ (Wickham‐Jones 2000, 12). Besides important organisational reforms designed to deprive delegates, unions and activists of power in favour of giving more power to the leadership (Jun 1996), one major plank of this effort was the 1987–89 policy review ‘Meet the Challenge, Make the Change’ (Labour Party 1989). The review process demonstrated that thinking was changing: the recommendations significantly weakened the party's commitment to Keynesianism, nationalisation, redistribution and trade union rights.…”

“…This modernisation was shaped both by party-internal procedures—committees, policy fora and programme commissions—and by experts from outside the parties whose expertise, at times, circumvented and overrode the ‘official’ internal policy and programme-making institutions. The modernisation process was aided by the strengthening of party elites in both parties through various organisational changes (Jun 1996). This article highlights, in particular, if and how external expertise from think tanks was relevant in this modernisation process.…”