Where have all the members gone? the dynamics of party membership in Britain

Parliamentary Affairs

Volumn 62, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 242-257

  Whiteley, Paul ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67650999900     PISSN: 00312290     EISSN: 14602482     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pa/gsn054     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. P. Seyd and P. Whiteley, Labour's Grassroots, Clarendon Press, 1992; P. Seyd and P. Whiteley, New Labour's Grassroots, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002; P. Whiteley, P. Seyd and J. Richardson, True Blues: the Politics of Conservative Party Membership, Oxford University Press, 1994; P. Whiteley and P. Seyd, High Intensity Participation: the Dynamics of Party Activism in Britain, University of Michigan Press, 2002; P. Whiteley, P. Seyd and A. Billinghurst, Third Force Politics: Liberal Democrats at the Grassroots, Oxford University Press, 2006.
2. R.S. Katz et al., 'The Membership of Political Parties in European Democracies, 1960-1990', European Journal of Political Research, 22, 1992, 329-45; S. Scarrow, 'Parties without Members? Party Organization in a Changing Electoral Environment' in R.J. Dalton and M.P. Wattenberg (eds), Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial, Democracies, Oxford University Press, 2000; P. Mair and I. van Biezen, 'Party Membership in Twenty European Democracies, 1980-2000', Party Politics, 7, 2001, 5-21.
3. S. Scarrow, Parties and Their Members, Oxford University Press, 1996; R.J. Dalton and M.P. Wattenberg (eds), Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Societies, Oxford University Press, 2000; P. Webb, P.D. Farrell and I. Holliday (eds), Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, Oxford University Press, 2002.
4. The grant is called 'Performance Politics: the Dynamics of Political Support in Britain' and is jointly directed by Paul Whiteley and David Sanders from the Department of Government at the University of Essex.
5. Whiteley and Seyd, op. cit., n. 1; Whiteley, Seyd and Billinghurst, op. cit., n. 1.
6. The British Election Study of 2005 included a series of internet panel surveys which followed up on the original panels conducted during the campaign. The January 2008 panel contained a set of additional questions designed to survey party members, which is the basis of the present analysis. Details of the design of the 2005 study can be found on the BES website http://www.essex.ac. uk/bes/ and an extensive analysis of the surveys appears in H.D. Clarke, D. Sanders, M. Stewart and P. Whiteley, Performance Politics and the British Voter, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
7. D. Sanders, H.D. Clarke, M. Stewart and P. Whiteley, 'Does Mode Matter for Modelling Political Choice? Evidence from the 2005 British Election Study', Political Analysis, 15, 2007, 257-85.
8. Whiteley and Seyd, op. cit., n. 1.
9. Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson, op. cit., n. 1.
10. Clarke, Sanders, Stewart, and Whiteley, op. cit., n. 6.
11. Only 10 per cent of the electorate had very strong partisan attachments in the survey.
12. Seyd and Whiteley, 2002, op. cit., n. 1.
13. Menzies Campbell became party leader in March 2006 and stepped down in December 2007.
14. Whiteley and Seyd, op. cit., n. 1. See HMSO 1976. The Report of the Committee on Financial Aid to Political Parties (the Houghton Report). London, HMSO.
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18. A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, Harper and Row, 1957.
19. R.S. Katz and P. Mair, 'Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: the Emergence of the Cartel Party', Party Politics, 1, 1995, 5-28.
20. I van Biezen, 'Political Parties as Public Utilities', Party Politics, 10, 2004, 701-22.
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23. R. Putnam, Bowling Alone, Simon and Schuster, 2000.
24. P.F. Whiteley, 'The Origins of Social Capital' in J.W. Van Deth, M. Maraffi, K. Newton and P.F. Whiteley (eds), Social Capital and European Democracy, Routledge, 1999.
25. Scarrow, op. cit., n. 3.
26. P. Whiteley and P. Seyd, 'Local Party Campaigning and Voting Behaviour in Britain', Journal of Politics, 56, 1994, 242-51; D. Denver and G. Hands, Modern Constituency Electioneering, Frank Cass, 1997.
27. The ISSP is a continuing annual programme of cross-national collaboration on surveys covering topics important for social science research. The details of these surveys can be found on http://www.issp. org/.
28. D. Kaufmann, A. Kraay and M. Mastruzzi, 'Governance Matters V: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators for 1996-2005', World Bank, 2006, p. 4.