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Introduction
Few, if any, of the world’s democracies function without political parties. Parties package up myriad ideas and interests into more or less digestible manifestos and programmes, enabling us as citizens to cut through what would otherwise be bewildering complexity and to hold our governments to account. Parties also help recruit and train the politicians whom we allow to run the country on our behalf.
Yet parties are in trouble almost everywhere. In the UK, as in most other European countries, they are less and less trusted to do the right thing.1 They find it harder and harder to command the loyalty of voters, many of whom tell pollsters that there’s no real difference between politicians and that they are only in it forth-emselves. And although some parties have recently managed (temporarily at least) to buck what is a long-term, European-wide, downward trend, others struggle both to attract and to hold on to members.
Unless we are willing to see parties become essentially elitist, ‘hollowed-out’ institutions, these developments should give us serious cause for concern. In a truly healthy representative democracy, parties cannot simply be brands run by elites for their own and for our collective convenience. They do not need to be, or to behave like, social movements – even if enthusiasts for a more participatory form of democracy in the Labour Party, for instance, have taken to arguing that they should.2 But they do need to be rooted in, rather than disconnected from, society. Their programmes need to reflect meaningful differences between competing visions, be they idealistic or pragmatic, or both. And their leaders and candidates are best chosen by competitive election rather than appointment or inheritance.
Party members cannot, of course, guarantee that all this occurs all by themselves. But they can certainly help – both by demanding that their party’s policies bear at least some relation to its professed ideals and by demanding at least some say on who represents it. They are also important because they can make the difference between their party winning or losing an election – perhaps by picking the right or the wrong leader, perhaps by insisting that leader adopt popular or unpopular measures or perhaps simply by working hard at election time in close-fought contests. In short, although leadership matters, so does membership, and, to be successful, parties need to achieve the right balance between the two.
In spite of all this, we do not know as much as we might do about party members in the twenty-first-century UK. True, we ourselves helped carry out surveys of the Conservative Party’s membership in 2009 and 2013.3 However, the last fully comprehensive survey of Labour members was carried out back in 1997, and the last such survey of Liberal Democrat members was completed in 1999. Just as important, there has never been a study of the members of several parties carried out concurrently, thereby enabling us to ask them all exactly the same questions about who they are, what they think, and what they do for their parties, at exactly the same time. Nor has there ever been any systematic study of those who are strong supporters of parties but don’t actually join them or, indeed, of those who do join but then leave – people who, given the difficulties some parties seem to have in retaining as well as recruiting members, are surely worth looking at, too.
Of course, it is one thing to want to conduct this sort of survey research and quite another to work out the best way of doing it – especially at a time when many parties are understandably reticent about allowing researchers access to their membership lists, not just because of concerns about the embarrassment that some of the findings might cause them but also worries about data protection. Fortunately, that reticence is no longer the obstacle it once was, as long, that is, as one is able to navigate around it – something we were able to do thanks to a grant from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.4 That is because, nowadays, internet panels of the kind painstakingly assembled and maintained by the commercial opinion research company YouGov make it possible to independently obtain large samples of members of the six parties we focus on in this book – Labour, the Conservatives, the Scottish National Party (SNP), the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party of England and Wales, and the UK Independence Party (UKIP).5
In the early summer of 2015, then, we surveyed members of all those parties, along with people who felt a strong affinity with each of the parties but were not currently members of them, as well as members of Labour-affiliated trade unions. We surveyed party members again in the early summer of 2017, some (but not all) of whom we had spoken to two years previously. We also surveyed people who had been but were no longer members of political parties. In between, in the spring of 2016, we surveyed people who had joined the Labour Party after the 2015 general election, many of them as part of the so-called Corbyn surge, which, for obvious reasons, we were keen to explore and explain. Finally, just before Christmas in 2018, we surveyed members of Britain’s two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, in order to explore their views on the central – and possibly realigning – issue of our age, Brexit.
Approaching members in this way gave us complete freedom to ask them whatever questions we wanted to ask – and without the nagging fear that one or other of the parties would change their mind and veto the project at the last moment. The panel constructed by YouGov, which is also used by the British Election Survey, allowed us to directly compare actual and potential joiners, members and voters, as well as those members who stick with their party and those who leave. And, whereas previous surveys of party members were carried out years apart, we were able to conduct a simultaneous survey of members from several parties, allowing us to compare and contrast them to an extent that has never before proved possible. Moreover, because we, as opposed to the parties themselves, had control of the timing of the surveys, we were able to conduct them very shortly after not just one but two general elections – when members’ memories of what they did (or perhaps did not do) during the campaign were fresh.
‘Fresh’, of course, does not necessarily mean completely accurate or honest. Indeed, party members are surely no less prone to the ‘social desirability bias’ that leads all sorts of survey respondents to give answers that reflect well on them rather than tell the absolute truth – even when their anonymity is guaranteed and they are inputting those answers into a machine rather talking face-to-face to a human being. Moreover, this is far from being the only limitation faced by survey research. Another is that respondents can only do their best when selecting from a predetermined set of answers to a host of questions which may never have occurred to them and may seem pointless, even stupid, particularly towards the end of a long questionnaire. Obviously, by building on previous surveys that seemed to have worked reasonably well, by pre-testing questions, by consulting with other professionals, and by providing respondents with an opportunity to write in more expansive, free-form responses, one can attempt to minimize those problems.6 But one can never eliminate them altogether – any more than one can be sure that one’s carefully crafted questions are actually able to measure what they’re intended to measure. More frustrating still, however, are the questions that – goodness only knows why – we didn’t think of asking at the time but now seem so painfully obvious, especially when compared with questions that once seemed important but which time and chance have rendered pretty much irrelevant.
Even leaving these caveats and qualifications aside, a study of party members based solely on surveying them would still lack something crucial. Surveying them gives us an insight into what one might call the ‘supply side’ of membership – in other words, into those willing (or, in some cases, no longer willing) to offer parties their money and maybe their time. But what about the ‘demand side’ – the parties who, we assume, need those resources? How do they understand membership, and what do they want out of their members? Are they changing the way they do things, turning themselves into what one academic has called ‘multi-speed membership parties’ by creating novel, possibly less demanding (and less expensive) categories of affiliation so as to attract the support of people with varying levels of commitment?7 These are questions that, because their staffers and elected representatives are much harder to sample and survey, can only really be addressed by more qualitative means – studying and interpreting documents and, where possible, conducting interviews. That, therefore, is precisely what we have done, talking (off the record so as to encourage candour) with staffers, activists and politicians.
Our aim is to produce a book that will appeal both to an academic and a general audience. Scholars around the world who are interested in parties (and in elections and campaigning, representation and participation) will, we hope, gain valuable new insights into members’ social characteristics, their attitudes, activities, and campaigning; their reasons for joining and leaving; and their views on how their parties should be run and who should represent them – as well as learning something about how their parties are coping with the challenges of recruitment and retention in an era in which loyalty and commitment can no longer be taken for granted. But by making a determined effort to ensure the book is an accessible, even enjoyable read – one reason why we have confined any advanced statistical material to its appendix and to journal articles cited in its endnotes – we hope it will also be read by people outside the so-called ivory tower, not least by party members themselves. Ideally, it will serve as a go-to resource on membership and one based on hard data rather than on hearsay and half-truths about parties, including, most obviously, the common wisdom that they are all the same these days.
After Chapter 2 takes a look at what the existing research tells us about membership and the number of people who belong to parties, we begin in earnest, in Chapters 3 and 4, by exploring the demographic and attitudinal profiles of party members. Just how unusual – socio-economically, educationally, and ideologically – are they? Are they really so unrepresentative? How much does all this vary between parties? And how much do the members of the six parties constitute different, relatively distinct and cohesive ‘tribes’?
In Chapter 5, we look at why people join parties – something that’s particularly fascinating in an era where the widespread assumption that fewer and fewer people were bound to want to do so seems questionable, if not downright mistaken. We ask what distinguishes those who do join from those who don’t? We also take a look at why so many British parties, including those which have recently experienced defeat, enjoyed a surge in members recently – and is this likely to be a permanent or temporary phenomenon? Chapter 6 looks at precisely what (if anything) members actually do for their party – both between and during general elections. Does activism differ much according to which party’s members we’re looking at? And what might explain it in the first place?
Chapter 7 looks at what members think about how their party is – and should be – run and organized. What rights and obligations, and how much influence, do the members of different parties have? What are their attitudes towards their leaders and party headquarters? Do they feel that their party is sufficiently democratic? Do they feel listened to, valued and respected? What do they think of intra-party processes and reforms, particularly with regard to policy-making, leadership and parliamentary candidate selection (and deselection)?
Until very recently, the long-term trend in membership was clearly one of decline rather than growth. Even now ‘churn’/turnover may be more common than many imagine. And, of course, recent surges enjoyed by several British parties may ultimately prove temporary. Chapter 8 addresses the factors that lead people to leave parties. What are the most common reasons given for quitting? How do they relate to their reasons for joining? How do those who leave differ attitudinally and demographically (and in terms of activism and feelings about intra-party processes) from those who stay? Can we predict who’ll stay and who’ll go?
Chapter 9 switches gear by drawing on off-the-record interviews to look at the demand rather than the supply side. Why do parties still seem keen to recruit and sustain mass memberships? How do party professionals and elected representatives regard their rank and file? How important do they think they are, for example, in terms of campaigning? What costs and benefits do they bring? How much influence do they think members have (and should have)? And what are parties today doing in order to retain members, recruit new, younger and less traditional members, and manage their demands and activities?
In Chapter 10 we recap our major findings and arguments, and we look ahead, perhaps paradoxically, by recalling some perennial tensions between party members and their leaders.
We begin, however, by summarizing in Chapter 2, what we think we already know about party members and party membership in the light of decades’ worth of research on them, both in the UK and elsewhere.
Notes
