Ruling the informational void: ideational infrastructure and party democracy in the United Kingdom

Bick, Chris (2024) Ruling the informational void: ideational infrastructure and party democracy in the United Kingdom. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis casts new light on the state of contemporary party democracy and contributes to ongoing debates about party decline and possibilities for renewal. Most accounts of party decline tend to explain the struggles of contemporary parties by analysing exogenous factors, such as deindustrialisation and class dealignment, shifting voter preferences and the rise of individualism, or the rise of new communication technologies that render traditional modes of political organising obsolete. While all of these approaches offer important perspectives, they often miss the question implied by these declinist narratives: Why did parties let this happen? To address this question, I argue that the challenges facing contemporary party democracy cannot be properly understood without looking inside the parties themselves to understand how they have responded to changing external circumstances in the past and why they appear to be struggling to do so today. To do so, this project explores how party ideas — an essential but often overlooked aspect of party democracy — are developed, how processes of ideational development have evolved over the twentieth century, and how these changes contributed to what Peter Mair described as the "void" between parties and voters. This thesis develops the concept of ideational infrastructure – networks of organisations both inside and outside the party that facilitate the production and dissemination of political ideas — to develop a comparative historical analysis of the U.K. Labour and Conservative parties. It finds that over the course of the twentieth century, both parties underwent a process of ideational outsourcing, shifting responsibility for the production and distribution of their policy platforms from central party researchers to networks of party-external political professionals. Building from this historical base, it then examines how these externalised ideational infrastructures impact contemporary British party democracy. Using a combination of network analysis and interview research, it finds important deficits in the externalised ideational infrastructure of both parties, with Labour struggling to articulate broad programmatic appeals and the Conservative Party poorly equipped to engage in substantive, evidence-based policymaking. I conclude that this leaves both parties unable to properly function as democratic institutions, albeit for distinct reasons.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 John Christopher Bick
Library of Congress subject classification:	J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General) J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) > JN101 Great Britain
Sets:	Departments > European Institute
Supervisor:	Innes, Abby and Hopkin, Jonathan
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4875

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