ABSTRACT
This volume is hardly the first to make the strong case for treating political parties not as unitary actors, but rather as collections of individual political agents united, for whatever reasons, under a common label. Its contribution has been to demonstrate in practical research settings, at a variety of levels and using a wide range of methods, how political preferences and behaviour might be practically mapped and explored at the intra-party level. Despite the gains presented here, intra-party politics and the dynamics of political competition among political actors at the level below parties remains an exciting, and largely unexplored terrain. The purpose of these concluding remarks is to underscore some of the common threads that run through the earlier chapters.
