Can the Mass Party be Revived? Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party

• In Event: New Forms of Party Affiliation

Abstract

Traditionally, parties have articulated political cleavages through the diffusion of ideas and identity, which in turns translates social conflicts into representative, democratic institutions. However, in recent decades, mainstream political parties appear to have lost this function as they have delegated policy making authority to non-partisan state institutions and moved away from mass-mobilisation as a viable electoral strategy. But what happens when a party tries to transform its organisation and resurrect its articulating function? In this paper, I examine the unique case of the British Labour party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. When Corbyn became leader of the Labour party in September, 2015 he promised to enact a new form of politics. Corbyn’s intention was to articulate a new social cleavage through the mobilisation of various social movements into a mass party organisation. This would have required a transformation of Labour’s organisational structure through the development of new campaign infrastructures and ideational institutions. It almost worked. During Corbyn’s leadership, the party membership base increased to over 600,000 – making it the largest political party in any advanced industrial democracy. At the General Election of 2017, Labour increased its vote share by 10% and prevented the Conservatives from attaining a majority. Yet, just over two years later – Labour suffered its worst Election defeat since 1935. In this paper, I question why Corbyn’s attempt at changing the fabric of Labour’s organisational structure failed. I draw on the cartel party structure to develop a hypothesis that predicts that the way in which the party shifted its organisation structure in the 1990s embedded a number of veto points that prevent insurgent challengers from sustaining the internal coalition that is required to control and change the function of the party organisation. I employ logical Bayesianism to weigh the probability of my organisational power hypothesis relative to two mutually exclusive rivals: a rational choice hypothesis; and a personalised politics hypothesis. I find that the Labour party’s failure to adapt its organisation, despite internally and externally favourable conditions, is most plausibly explained by the institutional stasis predicted by the organisational power explanation. This paper has important implications for our understanding of the function of contemporary political parties within advanced industrial economies. It also offers a new explanation for the decline of mainstream left parties in Europe.

Author

• Max Kiefel, Harvard University