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Chapter Three THE LOGIC OF THE NEW PARTY SYSTEM I. Cluster Parties: Organizational and Ideological Dimensions Economic entrepreneurs are most likely to employ one of two basic modes of operation. They may first explore the customers’ needs and then attempt to satisfy them ahead of rivals. Alternatively, they may seek to shape the customers’ taste, thereby creating a need for their merchandise. The fashion industry offers a distinctive example of the latter course. The successful designer must be something of an adventurer and experiment boldly. He cannot allow his imagination to run riot, and part of his expertise lies in assessing what the culture and conditions will allow, but within such restraints he is autonomous. In a similar sense, the moves—and countermoves discussed in chapter 2 were not simply dictated by the blurring of the lines of social demarcation and the growing standardization of norms in the Israeli society. Rather, these conditions permitted the parties to shift the grounds of their competition by reshaping the electorate’s conception of its needs and of the meaningful alternatives open to it. The relatively high degree of party autonomy this suggests appears to contradict one of the cherished postulates of organizational theories in general and of theories of party change in particular. That parties are conservative organizations explains for proponents of the social-structural approach why parties do not remold themselves to suit deep-lying changes in their socioeconomic environments ; for critics subscribing to the adaptive-organizational approach, it explains why transformations proceed in ordinary circumstances only at a piecemeal rate; for those holding the purposive-action approach, it explains why parties do not usually change of their own volition but through conscious leadership efforts. The contradiction between what occurred in Israel and the basic postulation is however more illusory than real, especially if we discount the notion of conservatism as no more than opposition to all change. Underlying resistance to change derives from the fear, sometimes tacit, that it will forfeit or endanger routines, positions of power, vested interests, or long-held beliefs. Beyond such an obvious statement at least two difficulties 59 60 Ideology, Party Change, and Electoral Campaigns in Israel hinder generalization. First is the diversity of what may come under threat. The range may extend from party identity to the status of individuals, from sectional economic interests to the choice Learned Hand described as that “between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.” Furthermore, party members need not share precisely the same values, and they may attach different degrees of importance to the values they do broadly share. Parties seek to achieve an equilibrium between differing and sometimes contradictory demands, and one should avoid the “teleological prejudice” of “attributing a priori ‘goals’ to parties which in the observer’s mind represent [their] raison d’être.”1 The second difficulty is that change does not affect to the same degree values, whatever they are and however they are regarded. It may reduce the dangers to some or even enhance them. From the party member’s point of view, the consequences of change constitute a continuum extending between the poles of the purely positive and the purely negative. Changes usually yield results that fall somewhere in the middle, involving trade-offs between the desirable and the undesirable. From the organizational point of view we are dealing with a number of such continua, and the trade-offs are between one another. By conservative tendencies we mean, inter alia, the inclination to emphasize the likelihood of detrimental effects and the relative importance of what is threatened versus the dubiousness of future returns. However, even conservative individuals or organizations will embrace changes where the ratio between the positive and negative is overwhelmingly in favor of the former. This was patently true of Herut and Ahdut Ha’avoda, which courted the Liberals and Mapai, and the very fact that these for the most part fell in with the proposals shows that for them too it was better than going it alone. This could lead to a wrong conclusion. As noted earlier, the shifts involved a blurring of party programs dictated not by the need to adjust to changing environmental conditions but by deliberate political decisions. It would seem that Israeli party leaders and activists regarded elections as no more than contests among political organizations and elites, and that ideology carried therefore little weight. If both the timing and the nature of party transformations were merely matters of expediency, parties would...

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