The British Constitution and the Structure of the Labour Party

Gerhard Loewenberg

American Political Science Review, 1958, vol. 52, issue 3, 771-790

Abstract: The British Labour Party defies the classifications which students of the structure of political parties have developed. By its historical origin and its formal organization it would seem to be a mass party in the sense that Duverger and others have used that term. But it has also exhibited, notably since 1945, the characteristics of a traditional parliamentary party, denying its mass membership power and influence and allowing its parliamentary leaders the exercise of full authority. Yet in the nineteen-thirties there was evidence that the Labour Party was developing all the characteristics of a mass party, doctrinaire in its program, unreconciled to parliamentary institutions, and anxious to subordinate its parliamentary leadership to the extra-parliamentary organization. It is the defeat of this tendency and the assertion of parliamentarism in the period since World War II which makes this a decisive epoch in the development of the Labour Party, the study of which offers an explanation of the paradox of the party's structure.

Date: 1958
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