fromsocialdemocracybacktonoideology（25页）.docVIP

From Social Democracy back to No Ideology? - The Scottish National Party and Ideological Change in a Multi-level Electoral Setting Peter Lynch Introduction Nationalist and regionalist parties have often been characterised as ideologically heterogeneous (Hix and Lord, 1997; De Winter and Türsan, 1998). This situation makes regionalist parties difficult to classify in conventional left-right terms though viewing these parties as an ideological family is to misunderstand their role and significance. Ideological profile can be understood as a secondary characteristic of regionalist parties, as opposed to their primary characteristic of support for self-government – the core business of autonomy (De Winter, 1998, 208-9): which in itself contains a variety of constitutional options to reorganise the territorial distribution of power within a state (Rokkan and Urwin, 1983). However, though ideological positioning may be a secondary characteristic, most regionalist parties have adopted an ideology – in the SNP’s case social democracy. As will be explained below, the reasons for adopting an ideology in itself, in addition to a particular ideology, are complex. For the SNP, the ideological position of elites, the policy preferences of the party’s membership and the adoption of an electoral strategy to challenge a dominant political party in the region (Labour) were all influential. The adoption of an ideological position was not always uncontroversial but became easier due to party system change (the electoral decline of the Conservatives in Scotland from the 1960s), as the SNP came to focus much of its attention on Labour as its primary competitor. This strategy became successful in the 1980s and 1990s as voters began to recognise the SNP as a left of centre party, with quite similar policy preferences to Labour. However, in the period following the SNP’s ideological consolidation in the 1990s, the party faced a changing political environment as Labour’s catch-all