Populists in Mainstream Parties: How Jeremy Corbyn Failed to Manage Dissent in the Labour Party

This thesis examines how populist faction leaders in mainstream political parties manage dissent by studying how they deal with the other factions within their party that disagree with them. The analysis thus provides a link between the literature on populism and on party politics, filling gaps in those literatures about how mainstream parties deal with populist leadership.
The investigation examines the Labour Party under the populist leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected on a manifesto promising to empower the membership over party elites. The thesis employs a qualitative research design focused on interviews and archival work, using over 200 interviews with figures at every level of the party.
The thesis applies two main theoretical frameworks. Within the party politics literature the thesis builds on Robert Michels’s framework, which treats mainstream parties as oligarchic structures whose success depends on placating elites. Within the populism literature the thesis draws on Cas Mudde’s definition of populism as a thin-centred ideology depicting politics as the struggle between a virtuous people and a corrupt elite.
The thesis finds evidence from the case study that populist factions will ignore the norms and constitutional rules that exist to maintain a level of unity in the party and consider their mandate as derived directly from the membership, which overrides the need to placate other party factions. Populist leaders will exacerbate trends to give the membership more power even if it increases chaos within the party.
Moreover, marginalised elite groups may provide support to the populist faction, allowing it to win votes and change the party constitution in a transactional exchange for heightened influence. These findings challenge ideas about how factions operate within mainstream parties and it has wider implications for the study of political parties at a time when parties have increasingly enfranchised their membership, which leaves them open to a populist takeover.