Rhetorical renunciation of the past alone fails unless paired with organizational change

Evidence

However, if it alone represented the party’s efforts to transform, breaking with the past could lead to charges of the party trying to get away with making opportunistic changes that were not credible or sustainable. For outside observers, if unaccompanied by organizational centralization, selfcriticism and denunciations of past organizational forms were little more than a smoke screen and a cynical attempt to regain support without fundamentally changing. For the party members, such renunciation could be perceived as a denial of their accomplishments and the ideology to which they were loyal for so many years. For their part, dissolution or member reregistration was likely to decimate the membership, and thus would eliminate the parties’ ability to mobilize support on the ground through local organizations and member volunteers – a ready pool of supporters, who would also mobilize the vote in labor-intensive but inexpensive campaigning. Therefore, breaking with the past was a counterproductive strategy for parties that either depended on or wished to retain their members and immediate circle of supporters. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 432

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to whether professed conviction (here apologetic rhetoric) without structural change convinces anyone — divergence between stated break and actual reform parallels the reader’s professed-versus-measured-bias theme. — connects to: Parties that abandoned their ideology early exploited negotiation timelines to overhaul organization — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 349; Outdated organizational partitions persist through tradition despite losing relevance — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1992; Cultural change can follow institutional change rather than precede it — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 2237 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Outdated organizational partitions persist through tradition despite losing relevance #corroborates (0.85) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1992
• Cultural change can follow institutional change rather than precede it #corroborates (0.75) — , The Rod and the Child, 2237