Analyzes the functioning of the French Socialist Party since 1970 & draws some broader theoretical implications from the case study. The author criticizes the dominant 'externalist' approaches to party performance & decline that describes parties as passive or as merely reactive to factors within their social-structural or institutional environments. Strategic choices & party performance can be explained by internal & external factors such as the specific organizational form adopted by the party, the relationship between intra-party resources, & inter-party politics (Kitschelt 1989, 1994). The French Socialist Party won two victories in 1981, the election of Francois Mitterand as president & the majority of seats in the National Assembly, in part due to a series of internal changes in the party in the 1970s. But subsequent internal problems led to electoral defeats by the mid-1980s. While factionalism had contributed to the party's growth & electoral success, it became institutionalized & inflexible & could not adapt to new challenges. The same organizational feature, therefore, helped or hindered depending on the circumstances. Internal dynamics of parties as well as models of parties affect their capacity to adapt to contemporary change. This hypothesis is empirically analyzed at the national level & at two provincial branches of the party. L. A. Hoffman
Applies theoretical, typological, conceptual, & empirical analysis to the changes within the European catch-all political parties. This article focuses on the 'crisis' of the changes in the catch-all party (Vokspartei) since the 1970s & the restructuring of the Western catch-all parties as society & the Parteienstaat, or party state, where they function. Three waves of party building are identified & four resulting types of parties are described. The author argues that O. Kirchheimer's term, 'catch-all' party has been used inappropriately since he referred only to the outgrowth of the mass-integration party. Most of the major parties in Europe are still catch-all, however, & since the 1980s, they have experienced lower levels of organization & societal penetration. Social democratic, Christian democratic, & conservative parties have adapted by becoming smaller, less structured, & more flexible in order to remain electorally competitive. The disadvantages of these changes have been their 'short-termism' & 'ad-hockery' in their programs & electoral appeal as well as their inability to socially integrate & mediate. The Spanish, Portuguese, & Greek parties that have traditionally been ad hoc mobilizers have adapted better than the more structured German SPD or the social democrats in Scandinavia. The catch-all parties are not in a crisis of legitimation, but have remained stable & have generally been able to reorganize enough consent to re-equilibrate the system. L. A. Hoffman
This article is part of the publication of contributions delivered at the 24th annual conference of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE), held at the University of Leipzig, 30.08.-05.09.1999. "A change of perspective has taken place in teacher education: It is no longer seen as the problem-solving agent of education but rather as just another source of educational problems. In this article, the author tries to trace the roots of such a negative image. The most obvious approach is a historical one. An enormous number of attempts have been made to reform teacher education. The most important and positive among these attempts has been the academic orientation of teacher education. Yet, seen from the educationalists' perspective, there have appeared a number of traps and false conclusions, possibly due to a misinterpretation of what the role of science in education should be. The reorientation of teacher education, i. e. the turn from purely didactical and practice-oriented courses at educational colleges to mainly academically oriented courses at universities, have brought up new problems that urgently need to be solved. The author discovers major problems in the fact that the great variety of research interests have to be brought in order to make them accessible to students. Didactics which are said to be the most important of all professional disciplines for teachers need to be applied to the structure of the educational discipline as a whole. An agreement on a fundamental canon of topics, methods and knowledge is necessary. This demand is, however, not meant to minimize the range of areas of study; instead, it should rather be considered to broaden specific fields of interest in order to avoid one sided academic points of view. The still unsolved problem of theory and practice is another point to be discussed. The author's question here is: "Where should educational knowledge be grounded - in the discipline or in the profession?" As it is not possible to make a clear distinction between theory and practice but rather to distinguish between the production and the application of knowledge, a curriculum is needed where those two aspects can be put together interactively. This seems to be a solution to many unsolved problems, as it would lead to a more specified target of academic teacher education. In Germany, the academic foundations for the teaching profession are laid in the initial phase of training at university. One should be careful not to ascribe tasks to academic studies that can realistically only be part of the probational second phase of teacher education. Yet, as education needs to be perceived as an action-oriented system of reflection, a significantly stronger combination of practical school experience and theoretical reflection is needed. Ideally, there would be greater stress on the combination of observation and analysis of school work which could be a means to reflect on professional practice. Also, the didactical aspects of teacher training, which are constantly being claimed as being of major importance to teachers, need to be rethought on the level of university teaching. This is a demand going with professionality on the side of academic teachers but it is also meant as a kind of compensation for the lack of practice-related teaching. Seminars and lectures would then be turned into didactical workshops. Another field of possible improvement is seen in an intensified form of investigative learning where school research is seen as a task for both students and teachers. For matters of quality ensurance university teachers need to be willing to co-operate and start to develop ideals and criteria which can later be evaluated. But as the great day of general consent on the national level can not be expected and as new regulations only will not bring real change, innovation can alone be expected by people bearing responsibility at the basis of different universities. The financial crisis of public households should not focus an saddening thoughts an economic efficiency that keep real innovation in the minds of idealists without being ever put to practice." (DIPF/Orig.).
