Actividades socioeconómicas

In summary: the strategy a party chooses consists of a mix of measures belonging to the extension and reinforcement strategies in the areas of tactics, programme and organ- isation. This mix can therefore contain both strategies at the same time, even within the same dimension. According to the theory outlined here, this mix emerges as part of a process that is here described as a two-step model. The six propositions formulated in the course of this chapter are enumerated in table 3.2. Preferences are formed in a path-dependent way through the inclinations of actors within the party, influenced by the historical institutional characteristics of the party in question. In particular, these preferences are influenced by variables which relate to the strength of a party’s ties to its electoral base and to its ideology. The stronger these affective ties or practical reliance on the base or on ideology, the stronger the pressure will be towards a reinforcement strategy. By all accounts, the constraints of the institutional environment in which a party oper- ates and the dynamics of the party system would appear in our formulation of the theory to be stronger than internal factors. This is because the main goal of a party in an elec- toral crisis is to win back votes: the environment logically imposes substantial constraints on how this can or cannot be done. Although external considerations will probably have an immediate impact in reality at least for some of the actors in the process, the model considers this impact to occur after the preferences have been shaped by internal consider- ations because it seems likely that this impact increases over time. In this way, our model can be said to consist of multiple phases of recovery strategies in which each successive strategy would be impacted increasingly by the external environment.

Thinking of the impact of various factors in two steps, the first being internal factors and the second environmental constraints, helps give analytical clarity to what is more likely than not going to be a messy continuous progression from one strategy to the other as certain considerations increase in importance over time. It is, in other words, a simplification of a complex reality intended to aid theorising. By comparing what a party initially intends to change about itself to what, by the end, it actually has changed about itself, we can test whether the impact of certain factors is as hypothesised and, within- case, whether the size of the impact does indeed vary over time. In the next chapter, the operationalisation of the model shall be considered in order to allow a test of the six propositions.

Table 3.2: Summary of propositions

’Whether’-stage

1. The higher the proportion of votes or seats lost in the shock electoral defeat relative to the last election, the greater the pressure towards change will be, and therefore the higher the probabolity that a party will diagnose a crisis. 2. When a party has previously experienced a defeat which meets the threshold

set for a crisis, this will strengthen the case for change and therefore increase the probability that a party will diagnose a crisis.

Internal factors

3. Parties which have higher levels of electoral base attachment are more likely to pursue the reinforcement strategy; those with lower levels the extension strategy.

4. Parties which have higher levels of ideological attachment are more likely to pursue the reinforcement strategy; those with lower levels the extension strat- egy.

5. Electoral base attachment impacts the organisational and tactical dimensions more than the programmatic dimension, while ideological attachment impacts the programmatic dimension more than the organisational and tactical dimen- sions, leading to the following concrete expectations:

a) Parties with a higher electoral base attachment tend to favour organisa- tional reforms shifting power towards the membership, whereas those with lower electoral base attachment tend to favour organisational reforms shift- ing power away from the membership.

b) Parties with a higher electoral base attachment tend to favour their core constituency, whereas those with lower electoral base attachment tend to favour a broader constituency.

c) Parties with a higher ideological attachment tend to highlight their tradi- tional values, whereas parties with a lower ideological attachment tend to downplay their traditional values.

External factors

6. Parties under FPTP are more likely to pursue the extension strategy; parties under PR are more likely to pursue the reinforcement strategy.

4 Methodology and Case Selection

4.1 Introduction

The previous chapter has outlined a heuristic model that can be used to interpret and explain the choices made by a party in crisis and formulated a number of hypotheses to help test its validity as well as generate insights that can be used to refine the model and develop it into a full theoretical model. This chapter will start by justifying the choice of a research design based on the comparative and case study methods in section 4.2 below. This is followed in section 4.3 by the specification of this comparative research design, in particular the case selection. After this, section 4.4 discusses the archival method of data collection and discusses the sources to be used in each case. Section 4.5 gives an operationalisation of the various concepts introduced in chapter three as dependent and independent variables. Finally, section 4.6 brings it all together, outlining the way in which this method will be used to test the six propositions formulated in chapter three.