Abstract
Footsoldiers marks the culmination of the most ambitious project to date to get to grips with British party members. Who are they? What do they think? Why do they join and get involved, or leave? What do they think of their parties, and vice versa? All these questions are answered in Bale, Webb and Poletti’s accomplished and accessible book. Footsoldiers will prove a perfect primer for those requiring an introduction – from undergraduate to postgraduate – and should land on many a core reading list, but regardless contains substantial insight even for the experienced researcher.
The research here is facilitated by an excellent data-collection effort, spanning six political parties and surveys across 3 years (and two general elections). The authors create a useful sense of continuity with earlier studies, operationalising and measuring variables in ways that are conventional in the literature. Where necessary, however, they take creative measures to solve new questions. In particular, to address the neglected area of ‘quitters’, they use open-ended responses to design an intuitive new battery for a later survey, putting both to work in the interpretation. Their results are communicated in clear and crisp tables throughout – though occasionally overwhelming through sheer volume of data.
The book is insightful on how party members ‘represent’ their party’s voters. Descrip-tively, they are older, richer, better educated, more male and much whiter than their voters. The authors suggest that the Conservatives face a unique political risk here. Its membership base is concentrated among the affluent and the South, but it is losing many such voters, particularly on the issue of Brexit, and gaining them among the (traditional) working-class and in the North. Labour’s voters, meanwhile, are becoming more like its members, particularly along the lines of education. Unfortunately, however, the authors do not run similar comparisons for voters’ and members’ political values, so we are left in some doubt as to how well this translates ideologically. There is nonetheless a timely and useful analysis of Brexit positions, which shows that both main parties were far more homogeneous than their voters either on stopping Brexit or leaving with No Deal.
An emergent theme is the tension between political parties as national institutions versus parties as embedded in their communities. In this area, the survey-based analysis and the insider interviews complement each other well. Members are more likely to be active – and active in more demanding ways – when they are embedded in a ‘solidary network’ around their local party. Yet, members now join through contact with the national party: their surveys testify to a dramatic change – even across just 2 years – in how people make first contact. A Liberal Democrat source sums up the challenge nicely: ‘how to go from a local, village politics organisation and make that suitable for people who join online, [for whom] politics is national, [and who] don’t have a sense of community in a geographic sense’. However, I would question how far this is driven by the deliberate preferences of members, compared to the erosion of other institutions – like the local media – that once sustained a degree of community political consciousness.
The weak point in the book is its failure to give enough attention to, or a coherent account of, the role of ‘anti-politics’. This applies both in the accounts of historical membership decline and in the analysis of recent data. Over time, this phenomenon has broadened and deepened along a timescale similar to dealignment, but it is given short shrift in comparison. Meanwhile, their analysis of joining decisions is hamstrung by collapsing ‘external’ and ‘internal’ efficacy into ‘personal efficacy’, which obscures the effect of anti-politics beliefs compared to the self-confidence captured by ‘internal’ efficacy.
This puts the authors on weaker ground when they highlight an intriguing contradiction: in general, ‘anti-politics’ beliefs dissuade joining, but under certain circumstances, they can motivate it. For instance, the authors find that Labour members joining after the 2015 election – overwhelmingly Corbyn supporters – were more politically cynical than long-standing members, which ‘played a part in them joining’. The shifting of the comparison here is problematic: these members might still be less cynical than ‘supporters’ who do not join. Notwithstanding this reservation, the observation is deserving of further comment. What results from the politically cynical becoming party members? Can we better understand intra-party antagonisms, such as the rank-and-file’s contempt for many Labour Members of Parliament, in this light?
Likewise, I would have hoped for more elaboration on attachment to democratic norms as a motivator. Although their surveys suggest ‘supporting the democratic process’ is a potentially major spur to signing up, this is waved away as a ‘high-minded rationalisation’ for joining. This is unfortunate at the present time: threats to democratic norms have appeared to mobilise people in defence of such high-minded principles, such as during the ‘stop the coup’ protests against the prorogation of Parliament.
In summary, Footsoldiers is an important contribution to understanding party members in Britain, setting a new gold standard for quantitative research on parties. The authors might have paid closer attention to the role of how members (and potential members) see politics as a force for good or ill. However, Footsoldiers should nonetheless facilitate important conversations on the challenges faced by both specific parties and our wider democratic system.
