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This paper develops a new theory arguing that party change results from ruptures in political parties’ ties to civil society organizations. I demonstrate the utility of this approach by using it to explain why the Rhode Island Democratic Party (RIDP) changed from a hierarchical machine to a porous political field occupied by multiple interlegislator cliques and brokered by extra-party political organizations and professionals. While others attribute party change to bureaucratization, electoral demand, or system-level changes, I analyze historical, observational, and interview data to find that a severance in the RIDP’s relationship with organized labor prompted party change by causing power to diffuse outward as leadership lost control over nominations and the careers of elected office holders. In the spaces that remained, interest groups and political professionals came to occupy central positions within the party field, serving as brokers of the information and relationships necessary to coordinate legislative activity. This analysis refines existing theories of party change and provides a historically-grounded explanation for the institutionalization of interest groups and political professionals in American party politics.

Despite a legacy of research that emphasizes contradictions and their role in explaining change, less is understood about their character or the mechanisms that support them. This gap is especially problematic when making causal claims about the sources of institutional change and our overall conceptions of how institutions matter in social meanings and organizational practices. If we treat contradictions as a persistent societal feature, then a primary analytic task is to distinguish their prevalence from their effects. We address this gap in the context of US electoral discourse and education through an analysis of presidential platforms. We ask how contradictions take hold, persist, and might be observed prior to, or independently of, their strategic use. Through a novel combination of content analysis and computational linguistics, we observe contradictions in qualitative differences in form and quantitative differences in degree. Whereas much work predicts that ideologies produce contradictions between groups, our analysis demonstrates that they actually support convergence in meaning between groups while promoting contradiction within groups.

Organizations from the same industry or field often tend to become more similar over time, despite being different in terms of for example strategies, goals, or performance. However, recently scholars pointed out that organizational fields are dynamic entities with permeable boundaries, thus indicating that prior literature may have oversimplified the phenomenon. Indeed, in this paper we draw attention to an organizational field that centers on text, and revolves around shared (or debated) meaning stemming from that text. The guiding research question is, “To what extent do organizations converge or diverge from meaning embedded in interconnected text?” We investigate party manifestos and press releases of organizations from the field of politics, focusing on the topic of immigration. We extract meaning from these texts, using document scaling and similarity analysis. Our results show that while most parties become more similar in their framing of immigration, the anti-immigrant PVV actually radicalizes further and as a result takes an isolated position in the policy space. Thus, Dutch political organizations became similar (converge) as well as different (diverge) over time through interaction, in terms of their shared meaning systems. This paper substantiates findings of isomorphic tendencies of organizations within a shared organizational field. At the same time, we find that Dutch politics constitute an issue field, where parties compete about meanings and framings on controversial issues. Our analysis shows that meaning embedded in texts changes over time; this indicates that change mechanisms in organizational fields may be brought about through changes in meaning systems.

How are we to make sense of the attitudes of Social Democratic parties towards decentralisation? What do they think about what is a legitimate territorial allocation of power? What factors shapes this view? And what makes Social Democratic parties change their minds? This article addresses these questions by way of competing ideological traditions, the external strategic incentives and internal constraints. Empirically, the article presents a comparative case-study analysis of Social Democratic parties in four countries (Belgium, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom). On the basis of this analysis, I argue that the positioning of Social Democratic parties on decentralisation is influenced by strategic incentives created by the structure of political competition, whereas the policy shifts are more often produced by factors that are internal to the party. A decentralist policy shift is always associated with the capacity of regionalist parties to set the agenda by exerting pressures on Social Democratic parties. In addition, Social Democratic parties tend to shift their policy while in opposition to distinguish themselves from their centralist mainstream rival in government. The dominant mechanism found across four countries was one in which regional branches persuade the central party leadership to adopt a pro-decentralist position. This chapter illustrates how Social Democratic parties have an instinct for ‘adaptation and control’ in the face of social-structural changes, and it demonstrates that the prevalence of different ideological traditions will vary according to external strategic incentives and, crucially, by the party's internal ability to follow those incentives.

The conflict in Angola saw some of its most intense periods after the end of the Cold War, missing a favorable period of conflict resolution in this transition. This chapter analyzes the reasons that were behind the failure to reach a successful peace process at this specific time when Namibia worked out a peaceful solution but Angola failed with the Gbadolite initiative. The analysis uses a “ripeness” model focusing on agency and processes over the 1989 Gbadolite Accords and its immediate context of the 1988 New York Accords and the aftermath of the 1991 Bicesse Accords. It is proposed that there was a lack of “ripeness” in Angola. On one hand, a resolution of the Angola conflict was not essential to finding a regional solution for Southern Africa, and on the other hand, both parties, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), lacked the conditions to effectively engage in a political solution. Namely, the parties were monolithic, the military process had not reached a point of hurting stalemate, and the incentive structures in terms of oil and diamond wealth in the country hindered both party predispositions. It concludes that finding a point of “ripeness” might take time; it is an agency envisioned process and as such can be possible within virtual new solutions that accommodate old power concerns.

In the 1990s, European social democrats coalesced around a set of principles often referred to as the third way – characterised by prudent economic governance, a slimmer public sector, ‘productive’ welfare services and attraction to inward investment. Third way proponents perceived fairness as supporting opportunity rather than redistributing welfare. On the way to the late 2000s, their sense of direction was lost. The final phase, one might argue, ended with the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Henceforth, the challenge for the Left concerned how to define a social democracy with less revenue and limited scope for expanding public services, while reaching out to the so-called left-behinds through better jobs and a renewed sense of common purpose.

Jeremy Corbyn and Emmanuel Macron represent two distinctly different attempts at forging a new way forward from the impasse. During Corbyn's tenure as a leader (2015–2020), Labour carved out space by moving leftwards on key economic policies while proffering communitarianism as the antidote to globalised capitalism. Across the English Channel, Macron's new party, La République En Marche, sought to generate a new form of politics that had clear similarities with the centrism of third way social democracy, supplemented by an emphasis on social dialogue and enhanced European integration as a strategy for harnessing globalisation.

Corbynism and Macronism represent two distinct attempts at centre-left renewal, both personalised yet evolving on the back of mass movements. This chapter summarises the trajectory of both in terms of ideological content and organisational change and asks what lessons they convey about the future of social democracy in the twenty-first century.

It is often said that we live in a time of crisis for social democracy. Many of the West European centre-left parties that seemed the natural parties of government in the second half of the twentieth century are in decline. The most common long-term explanations centre on a shrinking working class, a widening gap between the party elite and their core voters, and the challenges from new populist parties and/or greens. Short-term policy factors include the failure to address the recent financial and refugee crises. None of these factors carry much explanatory weight for developments in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in the three decades since the transition from communism. We find that much of the explanation for the rise and the fall of the five social democratic parties in these countries lies in the dynamics of party competition and party system change. All parties face dilemmas of policy, electoral appeal and coalition-building. The Central European cases suggest that it is how social democrats handle such challenges and make difficult choices about strategy and tactics that ultimately shapes their long-term fate. Centre-left parties are stronger masters of their fortunes than much of the literature on the decline of social democracy suggests. Consequently, seeking a common structural explanation for the rise and decline of social democratic parties might be a double fallacy: both empirically misleading and a poor base for policy advice.

This chapter will examine the rise and downfall of the Irish Green Party from a party of protest through their elevation as junior coalition partners in the national government from 2007 until 2011. An ‘Event History Analysis’ (EHA) (Berry & Berry, 1990) through an ‘Issue History’ (Szasz, 1994) will be applied to the key events in this process, in order to illustrate the key motivations, moments, potential successes and enduring difficulties which emerged during this time. An Event History Analysis provides an explanation for ‘a qualitative change’ that occurs as a result of key events in an organisation's history (Berry & Berry, 1990). An Issue History requires a trans-disciplinary analysis of events using theories and methods from history, sociology, political science, sources from the state, the media, surveys and the social movements, in addition to theories of political economy and postmodernism, to analyse various interrelated facets of the salient ‘issue’ being studied (Szasz, 2004, 2008).