ABSTRACT

Parties are essential to representative democracy, even if they are held in low esteem. And members are essential to parties. They prevent them from becoming mere vehicles for leaders by anchoring them to sets of ideas. They root them in the societies they aspire to govern. They help them fight elections. They provide a pool from which they choose their candidates. We should therefore care about who they are, what they think and what they do. Finding that out, and finding out why they join their parties and, in some cases, why they leave them, involves asking them in detail - something we have done in a series of surveys covering six of the UK’s biggest political parties. We complement those with interviews with party staffers and politicians to help us discover not only what members want out of their parties but also what parties want out of their members.