ABSTRACT
The UK is unusual right now because rather than falling, as it is in many parts of Europe, party membership has been growing, although more so in some parties than others. The UK was also one of the first countries in which researchers, starting in the early 1990s, began to study party members in earnest. The methods and the models of those pioneers have now been adopted by researchers in a host of other countries. It also means that we are in a position to look at how membership has or has not changed over time. It also means that we have some assumptions about demographics, about attitudes, about activism and about members’ thoughts on the organizations that we can build on and test as we explore party members in twenty-first-century Britain.
