Innovations, Reinvented Politics and Representative Democracy

"This volume focuses on the issue of change in democratic politics in terms of experimental or actual innovations introduced either within political parties or outside the party system, involving citizen participation and mobilization (...)"

An Undying Breed? The Electoral Mobilization of Supporters’ Networks by the Conservative and Labour Parties in the UK

International audience

Leadership and Uncertainty Management in Politics

Through a range of international case studies from the USA, UK, France, Germany and Italy, this engaging new text examines political leadership and considers the rise in the Executive powers of Western democracies in the last few decades.Unlike earlier assessments of the subject, which have emphasized the importance of a unified force of followers rallying behind a public figure, this volume argues that leadership can also be understood as a risk-taking venture which takes advantage of uncertainty among voters.Assessing the conditions necessary for effective leadership, it emphasizes the part played by indecision and division amongst followers and shows that political leadership can be a ca…

La Grande-Bretagne eurosceptique ?

Les primaires ouvertes en Grande-Bretagne : un idéal démocratique ?

International audience; Ce chapitre se propose de revenir sur le contexte d’adoption du dispositif des primaires par les partis conservateur et travailliste, ses mécanismes et les effets produits dans les deux principaux partis majoritaires, en examinant deux types de procédures : l’élection du leader et la sélection des candidats parlementaires. La comparaison entre les deux partis permet de mettre en évidence le degré d’expérimentation dans auquel chacun des deux partis s’est soumis. Elle révèle également des effets de mimétisme liés à la symétrie du système partisan britannique et la primaire apparaît, de ce fait, comme un facteur d’homogénéisation. Cette comparaison permet de concevoir …

Brexit and Anti-Parliament Discourses among Conservative MPs (2016–2019)

Abstract Brexit seems to have produced a new form of narrative in the Conservative Party in which some Conservative MPs brand themselves first and foremost as representatives of ‘the people’. Following on from the 2016 EU referendum, a new discourse has become prominent in the party and has also been developed as a new critique of the British Parliament. An analysis of Hansard debates between July 2016 and December 2019 helps identify different forms of anti-Parliament narrative which denounce the paralysis of the legislative process as well as its anti-democratic and conspiratorial features. By doing so, they reveal a radical departure from the historic values of the Conservative party suc…

Mais qui est Boris Johnson ?

International audience

Les habits neufs de David Cameron.

Les partis politiques en Grande-Bretagne

National audience; La vie politique en Grande-Bretagne est marquée par l’une des histoires les plus riches et anciennes d’Europe, mais son originalité reste largement méconnue – surtout par le public francophone, qui la réduit trop souvent à l’affrontement des deux grands partis dominants : Labour et Tories.D’où le présent ouvrage qui analyse l’ensemble des partis politiques, en soulignant la force des changements intervenus récemment en Grande-Bretagne. Fondé sur une définition précise du parti politique, il tient compte des multiples dimensions des organisations partisanes (idéologie-valeurs, ressources, soutiens). Il insiste aussi sur la modernisation des grands partis majoritaires (New …

From soft to hard Brexit: UKIP's not so invisible influence on the Eurosceptic radicalisation of the Conservative Party since 2015

International audience

La nouvelle carte électorale du conservatisme européen

Les elections europeennes de juin 2009 ont vu la tres nette victoire des partis de la droite moderee. Cette nouvelle « vague bleue » si elle affirme l’hegemonie des droites sur les gauches, redessine aussi la carte du conservatisme europeen. Dans un contexte de crise sociale et economique, ces resultats posent question : pourquoi les defenseurs du liberalisme economique reussissent si bien partout en Europe au detriment des forces progressistes ? Quelle est la « formule gagnante » qui peut-etre explique leurs succes ?

L’Angleterre est-elle toujours britannique ?

‘Less Stale, Only Slightly Less Male, but Overwhelmingly Less Pale’: the 2015 New Conservative Brexiters in the House of Commons

AbstractThis article will study the new face of Conservative Euroscepticism in the House of Commons, with a special focus on the 2015 intake of MPs who were supposedly ‘less stale, male and pale’ and their attitudes to the British referendum on the EU. In this respect, this article will also take a specific interest in new Conservative Black and Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) MPs who turned out to be more active on the ‘leave’ side of the referendum campaign, thus serving as a showcase for the party's strategy of ‘decontaminating’ the Brexit brand and its hyperglobalist geopolitical perspective.

The ‘Open Garden of Politics’: The impact of open primaries for candidate selection in the British Conservative Party

International audience; Since 2003, hundreds of open primaries for the selection of parliamentary candidates have been held by the British Conservative Party as a means of democratising party organisation and enhancing representativeness. In the run-up to the 2015 general election, only 26 primaries could be identified. This article will apply the analytical framework provided by Hazan and Rahat to demonstrate that the relative failure of the experiment in terms of intra-party competition, participation, representation and responsiveness is counterbalanced by the benefits brought by this procedure, both as a tool of party branding at the national level and as a strategy for raising the prof…

Les mutations de la vie politique britannique

National audience

Avant-propos

Quelques mois après la nouvelle victoire de Tony Blair, en mai 2005, un sondage MORI du 18 juin 2006 indiquait que 41 % des Britanniques se disaient prêts à voter pour les Conservateurs contre 34 % pour les Travaillistes. 41 % d'entre eux estimaient même que le nouveau dirigeant conservateur, David Cameron correspondait mieux à leurs attentes que Gordon Brown et Tony Blair qui ne recueillaient respectivement que 37 % et 27 % d'opinions favorables. Mais à quelques jours du remplacement de Ton...

Quand l'Europe déserte la campagne

International audience

Le parti conservateur britannique

International audience

Crafting the Commons: The Art of Selecting Conservative and Labour Parliamentary Candidates for the 2015 General Election

International audience; Crafting the Commons: The Art of Selecting Conservative and Labour Parliamentary Candidates for the 2015 General ElectionThe selection of parliamentary candidates for the general election is one of the most crucial tasks carried out by local parties who have long enjoyed relative autonomy from party headquarters in this respect. But because the aggregate choices of individual local parties determine the composition of the parliamentary parties, the party leaderships in both parties have devised new strategies and rules allowing them to influence that choice. This is in order both to ensure both that future MPs are more in tune with the leadership line and that the so…

Le rôle des associations eurosceptiques et du United Kingdom Independence Party dans la campagne référendaire britannique de 2005 autour du traité constitutionnel européen

International audience

The Temptation of Populism in David Cameron’s Leadership Style

DOI: 10.1057/9781137439246\₁0; International audience; It may seem unusual to associate the widely-used concept of populism with the leadership of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron. Populism is, however, open to various interpretations and definitions and so easy to manipulate that it could apply to almost anything. Moreover, populism has so often been used to describe movements and groups critical of representative democracy, generating a ‘malaise’ (Mény and Surel, 2002: 21) or a ‘threat’ to democracy (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2012), that it is has become difficult to conceive it as a new political practice in the hands of democratic governments. To accept what would appear to be a co…

The post-referendum reconfigurations of conservative cleavages around black and Asian minority ethnic MPs

At the level of the Conservative parliamentary party, one of the main effects of Brexit has been a realignment of party cleavages. While the old cleavage between Europhiles and Eurosceptics is no l...

Reassessing British Conservative Euroscepticism as A Case of Party (Mis)Management

Much has already been written about internal party divisions and European integration (Hix and Lord 1997; Conti 2007; Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008; Conti 2014), with the example of the British Conservative Party of the 1990s often used as a textbook case of a mainstream government party expressing some forms of opposition to European integration. In a wider comparative framework, the party can also be located within a Eurosceptic drift across the centre-right in the EU (Best 2012, p. 140). The case of the British Conservative Party is all the more relevant as the history of European integration shows how party families on the centre-right initially played an active part in the setting up of …

Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP: The reinvention of the Bonapartist Tradition

International audience

How Populist Was David Cameron?

The ‘rhetorical populism’ of the former prime minister's big society agenda may have waxed and waned, says Agnes Alexandre-Collier. But Cameron was an innovator of party management and governing practices whose focus on connecting with ‘the people’ transformed his party – but also supplied the means of his own downfall.

Le phénomène eurosceptique au sein du parti conservateur britannique

Au lendemain de la ratification du traite de Maastricht, l'euroscepticisme au sein du Parti conservateur se definit non seulement comme un discours a l'egard de l'integration europeenne mais egalement comme un comportement parlementaire distinct. En tant que discours, l'euroscepticisme, fonde sur les valeurs thatcheriennes du liberalisme economique et de l'independance nationale, s'articule autour de la defense du nationalisme, de la democratie et du liberalisme. Du point de vue du comportement parlementaire, les "rebelles" eurosceptiques s'appuient sur toutes les ressources et strategies disponibles, pour se mobiliser dans un vaste mouvement, dont la puissance aboutira a la defaite du part…

Le Mystère May

Le parti contre l'Europe : Les Conservateurs face à la question européenne depuis 1997

The use of primaries for the selection of party leaders in the UK Conservative and Labour parties: formal rules and ideological congruence

International audience

The nested games of the UK’s EU referendum: ruptures, reconfigurations and lessons for Europe

The 2016 decision by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union was a seminal one for both parties. In this special issue, we consider the extent to which the inter-penetration of the national and the European arenas produced significant opportunities for recasting political action. The nesting of these two levels matters firstly in allowing for the politicisation and mobilisation of domestic actors around European issues and secondly in explaining why seemingly sub-optimal or counter-productive actions are taken. The tensions this generated reached a critical juncture with the referendum, a rupture that highlights the extent to which a nominally second-order vote can have funda…

David Cameron et le leadership du parti conservateur britannique : la jeunesse est-elle un gage de modernité ?

International audience