Political Party Change

2.4. Change and Goal in a Political Party
As an organisation, political parties experience internal dynamics and have main goals. The party change, according to Harmel and Janda (1994: 275), can be defined as any variation, alteration, or modification in how parties are organised, what human and material resources they can draw upon, what they stand for and what they do. Harmel and Janda (1994: 266-268) convincingly provide four driving variables which determine a change in the party. First is leadership change. The shifting in party functionaries may be part of main indicator to change, where new leadership is considered to accomplish changes which have already been decided upon. As an illustration, leaders may be replaced for personal reasons

Second is change in dominant factions. Generally speaking, all parties have identifiable factions within them. Even some parties are partially can be classified as groups of rival factions. However, although the leadership alterations can occur without factional displacements, conversely, the factional displacement cannot occur without changes in the leadership. In brief, the factional displacement is a result of the leadership change. Third is external stimuli. it denotes to an external shock which immediately correlated to performance considerations on a party’s main goal which it causes the party’s decision makers undertake a vital re-evaluation of the party’s effectiveness on that goal dimension. It embraces a range of social, economic and political factors in environmental changes outside the party such as constitutional reforms, provision for public funding, birth of relevant new parties and changes in the proportions of votes and seats obtained by the

Firstly, for vote maximisers. The most obvious shock wave for the party is the electoral failure. The impact is the party will debate on how to wake up from dismal situations and seek another way to improve party’s achievements. Secondly, for office maximisers. It is only occur in a country which adopts multiparty systems, not in pure two-party systems. If in the latter system, one cannot distinguish between vote maximisers and office maximisers as winning the election embraces controlling the government. Office maximisers focus on reaching power in a coalition government. Thirdly, for policy/issues/ideology advocates. In fact, the shock directly related to the party’s policy positions is more important than the electoral failure and loss of participation in the administration. Such a shock can cause the alteration of the party’s identity and the losing of the party’s confidence. Fourth, for intraparty democracy maximisers. The source of change for these parties occur in their choice as an active representation which articulates members’ majority wishes. External changes such as societal or party system changes can alter makeup of the party’s