Abstract Nathalie DUCLOS

Nathalie DUCLOS (Université Toulouse-le-Mirail) : « The Scottish National Party: party organisation and internal reform ».

The organisation of the Scottish National Party (SNP), which is a Scottish centre left, pro-independence party, was radically reformed in 2004 after remaining largely unchanged since the 1960s, when the SNP had moved on from being a very marginal party to being a serious challenger in Scotland to the two major British parties, Labour and the Conservatives. It could be argued that until 2004, despite the fact that with the introduction of devolution in 1999, the SNP became a potential government party for the first time in its history, the party's constitution was more akin to that of a protest party than to that of the second biggest parliamentary party in Scotland. The main aim of this paper is to present the reforms imposed on the party in 2004 by its leader John Swinney (such as the introduction of the One-Member-One-Vote system or the new way of choosing the party's National Convenor), reforms that go a long way to explaining the party's first election victory in 2007. The paper also endeavours to explain John Swinney's motivations, as well as the Scottish political context in which this internal reform took place. This paper also considers the efforts recently made by the party to become more representative (by increasing the number of female elected representatives, for instance).