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Ideas and party change: the role of predistribution in labour’s ideological renewal

ABSTRACT The literature on political parties and ideologies tends to highlight the instrumental nature of that relationship. In those accounts, political parties are either constrained by ideology or they use ideology to fit their power-seeking strategies. But there is a third dimension in this relationship that has been overlooked and which reveals key and interesting insights about how political parties contribute to the production of ideologies. This article seeks to contribute to the growing literature on the relationship between political parties and ideologies by proposing a new methodological approach, which combines V. A. Schmidt’s discursive institutionalism and Peter A. Hall’s historical institutionalism, to study how political parties engage in processes of ideological production. This methodological approach, is applied to the analysis of how the idea of ‘predistribution’ shaped party change in the Labour Party under Ed Miliband, shows: a) how political parties use ideas to make sense of the world and to address specific political challenges they face; b) how political parties link zeitgeist ideas to their own ideological traditions; c) how parties try to renew ideological traditions whilst pursuing other goals.