Party Organization and Minority Nationalism: A Comparative Study in the United Kingdom

Political organization is a contingent, not a fixed, factor for most social groups. For such groups to gain electoral success, they must at some stage take a formal decision to construct a political organization and fight elections. Traditionally, political science has concentrated on the exogenous factors conducive to electoral success: it has rarely examined the endogenous factors which have brought political groups to adopt an electoral strategy and a differentiated organization. This paper argues that exogenous theories are by their nature only partial explanations, in so far as they ignore the endogenous factors of change within political groups. The argument is illustrated by a comparison of three minority nationalist groups in the United Kingdom: the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and the Northern Ireland Social Democratic and Labour Party. The paper examines the endogenous organizational changes which have ultimately resulted in each winning a measure of electoral success in the past decade.