FEATURE IT’S MY PARTY


It’s my party P


The ESRC Party Members Project has been surveying the members of the country’s six biggest parties to understand who joins political parties, why they join and their opinions on key issues. What has the project found? By Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Monica Poletti


ARTY MEMBERSHIP IS vital to the health of our representative democracy. Members contribute significantly to election campaigns and to party finances.


They are the people who pick party leaders. They constitute the pool from which parties choose their candidates. And they help anchor the parties to the principles and the people they came into politics to promote and protect. Beginning just after the 2015 General Election,


and with funding from the ESRC, we have, with the help of YouGov’s huge internet panel, been surveying the members of the country’s six biggest parties. The surveys we’ve conducted – after the 2015 and 2017 general elections, as well as an additional survey of Labour Party members in 2016 and a survey of those who’ve decided to leave their parties – constitute a rich resource for anyone wanting to understand who joins political parties, as well as why and how they do so. They give us an insight into their ideas and their priorities. And they give us a sense of what members do for their parties at election time, how they see candidate selection, and their impressions of, and their satisfaction with, the organisations they’ve joined. There have, of course, been surveys of party members before. Indeed, the pioneers in the


field were the British academics Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley who, beginning in the early 1990s, together with various collaborators and with the aid of the parties themselves, produced three full-length books on Labour, Tory, and Lib Dem members.


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The Conservative Party has a


significantly higher proportion (44%) of members who are over 65 years old than does Labour (where the proportion is 30%).


Members of both parties


are overwhelmingly white and very largely middle class Following their example, there are a number


of completed and ongoing studies of party members in various, mostly European countries carried out by scholars who, like us, are part of the international MAPP project hosted by the Free University of Brussels. Closer to home, scholars have recently completed surveys of the membership of the Scottish National Party and the Scottish Greens, of UKIP, and of the DUP. The added value of the Party Members Project based at Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University consists, first, in its fielding simultaneous and largely identical surveys of members of the Conservatives, Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and UKIP without having to rely on the cooperation of the parties themselves: this allows us to better compare those members and to ask any questions we want without worrying about whether the parties would approve. Second, because these surveys were conducted


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immediately after two general elections (in 2015 and 2017), they allowed us to ask about participation in campaigning when memories were still relatively fresh. Third, along with our 2015 survey we were


able to field similar questionnaires to people who identified strongly with one of the six parties but who hadn’t gone so far as to actually join it. This allows us to investigate the prompts for and the obstacles to joining more comprehensively than ever before: what differentiates those who joined from those who did not, and how do these two groups compare when it comes to campaigning? Fourth, because the ESRC very generously (and


very speedily) gave us an additional grant to run a second wave of surveys after 2017’s snap election (which constituted a third wave in Labour’s case because we had already run a supplementary survey in 2016 in order to explore its ‘Corbyn surge’ in membership), we will be able, effectively, to put together a panel study.


14 SOCIETY NOW WINTER 2018


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