An analysis of the Conservatives since 1945 provides insightinto what drives a political party to change

It’s easy to assume – as if it were somehow a simple matter of stimulus and response – that a big defeat will, or at least should, automatically lead a mainstream, electorally-driven political party to big changes, be they in personnel, in organization or in policy. But what if we are wrong? Political scientists have long been interested in the question of what drives parties to change who represents them, how they run themselves and what they stand for. Until now, however, their work has been confined to fairly abstract cross-national comparisons, on the one hand, and very brief country-case studies on the other. Even so, it casts doubt on the idea that change is always, or even mainly, driven by the ‘external shock’ of defeat and/or loss of office. It finds that leaders and, to a lesser extent, factional shifts make a big difference too