Paul Webb

• University of Sussex

Democracy is in decline, and the share of world’s population living in freedom under democratic government has decreased considerably as authoritarian practices proliferate. Surprisingly, most of the analyses that study these developments give little attention to the role of political parties in the decline of democracy, although there is a broad c...

Do local political party members reflect the views of voters in their constituencies? Since candidate selection by local party members is the most common form of candidate selection in the United Kingdom, it is important to understand local party members’ views, and how those views relate to views in the local area. We investigate the degree to whi...

Political observers agree that parties in European parliamentary democracies are more likely than previously to give party members opportunities to vote in decisions about party policies or personnel. Observers are less agreed about the implications of these apparent procedural trends. Some, including Peter Mair, saw them as evidence of the hollowi...

The underlying purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that the country’s electoral marketplace is more open than it once was and that, consequently, the competition for votes between parties is also more extensive. We begin with a consideration of how the electoral marketplace came to be relatively ‘closed’ in the first place, which entails an a...

This chapter explores intra-party power. How far are British political parties elitist top-down institutions? What roles do grassroots members play and how much power do they wield? How much do leaders and members have in common ideologically, and does that matter in the competition for votes? In reviewing a wealth of empirical evidence that bears...

This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview and account of the changing nature of party politics in Britain today. It draws on models of comparative politics to conduct a wealth of new empirical analysis to map and explain the ways in which the party system has evolved and the parties adapted to a changing political environment. Them...

This chapter examines the contributions of realignment and dealignment to electoral change. Realignment is particularly apparent in the emergence of sociopolitical centre-periphery cleavages. Post-materialism and attitudes to European integration have clearly served to realign electoral support, while there are also growing signs of electoral diffe...

This chapter explores a number of key questions relating to intra-party cohesion and conflict in Britain. To what extent do parliamentary backbenchers influence the development of government policy? How factionalized are British political parties? And what bearing does intra-party politics have on matters of cross-party cooperation and realignment?...

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of contemporary party systems in the UK by way of context for the detailed account of party politics in the chapters which follow. It starts by defining the term ‘party system’ before highlighting the difference between party systems under majoritarian and consensus models of democracy and consideri...

This chapter argues that ideological strategy provides us with a useful baseline in understanding party competition, although it is far from the whole story. Using manifesto data, we demonstrate that parties have carved out enduring core ideological territories for themselves, and although they move within these territories, there is seldom any lea...

Political parties in the UK today are widely seen as disappointing. This chapter examines the nature and causes of the present popular discontent by assessing how well parties perform political functions on behalf of the wider democratic system. It identifies shortcomings in this performance, for instance in parties’ roles in fostering representati...

Parties in the UK know that party competition is about far more than strategic shifts in ideology calculated to maximize voter appeal. It is also about the day-to-day business of projecting and protecting their reputations in the country’s print, broadcast, and social media, all of which are increasingly interrelated, even inseparable. This chapter...

What kinds of resources do parties have at their disposal? How are these resources distributed across the organization, and how are they deployed? Are modern British parties better or less well resourced than they used to be? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by focusing, in turn, on the three main resource assets that British parties...

This is the first of three chapters that considers how modern parties compete for votes and office. Since most formal models of party competition are based on the strategic use of ideological appeals to electors, it concentrates on describing the ideological stances of the parties in Britain: the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Labour, Greens, UK...

People who join political parties are motivated primarily, although not exclusively, by ideological impulses. So, given the often considerable ideological differences between parties, one might presume that very few those who later leave one party would be keen to join another. However, using a comprehensive 2019 survey of British party members, we...

Recent developments in British politics have foregrounded two issues of particular importance to Britons living overseas: their voting rights in the UK and Brexit. In light of this, the number of British expatriates registering to vote has risen sharply and provided an incentive to develop UK parties abroad. We, therefore, set out the history and o...

Political parties and interest groups play a vital role in incorporating societal interests into democratic decision‐making. Therefore, explaining the nature and variation in the relationship between them will advance our understanding of democratic governance. Existing research has primarily drawn attention to how exchange of resources shapes thes...

Drawing on survey data on the members of six British parties gathered in the immediate aftermath of the general election of 2015, this article asks what motivates members to engage in high-intensity election campaign activism. It argues that two factors are especially prominent: the aspiration to pursue a career in politics (which only accounts for...

What makes people join a political party is one of the most commonly studied questions in research on party members. Nearly all this research, however, is based on talking to people who have actually joined parties. This article simultaneously analyses surveys of members of political parties in Britain and surveys of non-member supporters of those...

This article investigates the remarkable surge in individual membership of the Labour Party after the general election of May 2015, particularly after Jeremy Corbyn was officially nominated as a candidate for the leadership in June of that year. Using both British Election Study and Party Members Project data, we explain the surge by focussing on t...

Drawing on survey data on the members of six British parties gathered in the immediate aftermath of the general election of 2015, this article addresses the question of what members do for their parties during campaigns. It identifies a key distinction between traditional forms of activity and more recent forms of online campaign participation. Whi...

One of the traditional functions of party members is to campaign on behalf of their party at general elections. However, they are not the only people who volunteer for the job. In the context of the growing literature on ‘multi-speed membership’ parties, it is important to ask what non-members do for parties they support. This paper examines how di...

A survey of ordinary members of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party carried out in 2013 revealed that nearly 30% of them would seriously consider voting for the country’s radical right wing populist party (United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)). However, we show that at the general election in 2015, only a very small proportion of them – aro...

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database (PPDB) project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this paper we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contem...

In this article, we seek to re-consider the ‘presidentialization of politics’ argument in the light of recent developments in Germany and the United Kingdom. The experiences of coalition government suggest prima facie grounds for the erosion of the presidentialization process in each country. Germany has operated with a Grand Coalition in which dom...

The revolution of personal leaders - Volume 45 Issue 3 - Fortunato Musella, Paul Webb

In the 2015 general election, the Conservative party did not just win an overall parliamentary majority against expectations, but they also increased their national share of the vote and secured additional seats in local government. The article examines the long and short term campaigns and contrasts the 2010 campaign with the one in 2015 to explai...

Résumé This article presents the results of a 2013 survey of Conservative Party members. The key question was : « Had you known in May 2010 what you know now about how the Coalition has worked and what it has achieved, which of the following options would you have supported : the coalition with the Lib Dems, a minority Conservative government, or a...

This research note draws on a new survey to reveal a widespread willingness among current Conservative Party members in Britain to countenance voting for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) at future general elections. Those most likely to do so are cultural conservatives, but they are not overly right-wing on the distributional dimension...

Stereotypes of Conservative Party members abound. But in a detailed survey of Tory rank-and-file, Tim Bale and Paul Webb found some surprising results: most are open to limited immigration, are wary of NHS cuts and would sanction another coalition with the Lib Dems.

This article demonstrates that two quite distinctive types of political disaffection – ‘dissatisfied democratic’ and ‘stealth democratic’ – exist among British citizens, with the former being more prevalent. While both types manifest low trust in political elites, the dissatisfied democrat is politically interested, efficacious and desires greater...

In Keith Dowding's recent Parliamentary Affairs article (Dowding, 2013) he pours scorn on those who maintain that it is useful to speak of the 'presidentialisation' of British politics. Our edited volume The Presidentialization of Politics (Poguntke and Webb, 2005) is one of those in the firing line. We should emphasise that there is a good deal in...

During the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, abortion amendments were debated in both Houses of Parliament. Analysis of the parliamentary divisions reveals that the majority of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs went through the progressive lobby while the majority of Conservatives voted for the more restrictive positions. Ar...

Although often treated as such, political parties are not unitary actors. Presumably, therefore, their leaders have to take at least some account of the views of their followers – not least when deciding whether or not to enter a coalition with other parties. Hitherto there has been relatively little research into those views. This article uses a s...

Can conservatives be feminists? This article examines the issue by exploring the case of the British Conservative Party, drawing on a new survey of party members. Under David Cameron's leadership, reforms have been made to the party's parliamentary selection procedures and distinct women's policies developed, thus addressing both the descriptive an...

The Daily Telegraph — a newspaper whose columnists and editorials have often not been shy in being critical of the Cameron Conservative party — heralded the election of 48 Conservative women MPs, on May 6th 2010, as the Party having taken ‘huge strides towards gender balance’.1 The representation of women on the Conservative benches following the g...

The coming together of those within the Conservative party seeking the greater descriptive representation of women for principled reasons, together with a new party leadership keen to be electorally competitive, created a favourable moment of opportunity for the selection of many more women parliamentary candidates between 2005 and 2010 (Kittilson...

The Conservative party’s women members are infamous. Often praised for being the ‘backbone’ of the party, stuffing envelopes and making tea, they are, frequently at the same time and sometimes by the same people, parodied as the ‘blue rinse brigade’. They are the party’s embarrassing secret, whose demise would not be mourned. One sitting MP, asked...

If David Cameron’s strategy of decontamination is widely acknowledged, the importance of feminization to reconstructing the Conservatives as a modern and no longer ‘nasty’ party is less often noted. Yet, and as previous chapters have shown, efforts to deliver a more representative parliamentary party and to make the party more electorally competiti...

One could not be sure how the Conservative party would act on women’s concerns in the 2010 Parliament; whether its manifesto pledges would be implemented or whether its broader perspectives on gender and gender relations would inform its overall governing actions. Analyzing how the party acted in opposition during the 2005 Parliament is, however, s...

Better representation for women in politics is often equated with the greater presence of women representatives in our political institutions. Underpinning this is an assumption, either implicit or explicit, that the first dimension of feminization begets the second; that the inclusion of women representatives engenders the inclusion of women’s iss...

If the Conservative party was out of favour with much of the British electorate during the New Labour years, its failure to appeal to women was also much remarked upon. The Conservative party, long renowned for attracting the votes of women, found itself apparently struggling to attract them. In particular, and in common with other advanced democra...

At the time of the 2010 general election, the Conservative party had been out of power for more than a decade. Swept out of power in 1997 by the New Labour tide, they ended up losing two more elections in 2001 and 2005, with three different leaders (William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard). For much of the first decade of the 21st centu...

The pre-Cameron Conservative party lacked electoral competitiveness on ‘women’s issues’.2 By the 2010 general election this was very much less the case. Policy pledges on maternity and paternity leave and pay, and flexible working, amongst others, suggested substantial reform, if not redirection of the party’s position, even if Cameron’s public com...

In this chapter, we seek to assess the nature of contemporary party leadership across the democratic world. We start by reviewing a number of well-known models of party organization with particular reference to the implications they carry for the relative power of leaders over their parties, noting the very definite tendency of more recent models t...

In this paper, we seek to assess the nature of contemporary party leadership across the democratic world, with particular reference to the 'presidentialization' argument proposed by Poguntke, Webb and colleagues in the book 'The Presidentialization of Politics' (Oxford, 2005). This entails a recap of the original argument, along with a review of re...

This article maps new survey data to show that there are three main ideological tendencies among Conservative Party members today and that they differ significantly on a range of contemporary political issues. The Liberal conservatives are the youngest, most male, claim to be the most active of these tendencies, and are distinguished by being the l...

With critical mass theory increasingly rejected as an explanatory theory of women's substantive representation, new conceptual approaches and methods are being suggested that look toward the role of multiple actors and multiple sites of representation, and which point to the importance of critical actors. Within them, there is particular concern wi...

This paper reports the results of new research funded by the Leverhulme Foundation, which employs experimental design to assess two hypotheses which are derived from the existing literature on popular alienation from politics and the potential for deliberative democracy to offer a solution to such alienation. The first hypothesis is that there are...

The conservative party For eight years after its disastrous defeat at the general election of 1997, the Conservative party found it difficult, if not impossible, to accept that the Thatcherite strategy for electoral success just was not working any more. 1 Populist policies that promised to be tough on law and order, limit immigration and resist Eu...

This article reflects on the current performance of political parties in the UK, using Alan Ware’s conceptual distinction between democracy as a means of interest optimalisation, democracy as a way of fostering civic orientation among citizens, and democracy as a mechanism of popular choice and control of government. Seen from either of the first t...

Under David Cameron's leadership reforms have been made to the Conservative party's parliamentary selection procedures and distinct women's policy initiatives have been developed. This article, based on focus group data with party members, explores attitudes towards measures designed to recruit more women Conservative MPs. Broadly, we find that, de...

Abstract will be provided by author.

This paper demonstrates the apparent assimilation of the European issue by the Conservative parliamentary party between 1997 and 2005. It does this through a cluster analysis of British Representation Survey data, which allows an assessment of the impact of Europe on the attitudinal cohesion of the party. This confirms the widespread impression tha...

Shows that the politics of democratic societies is moving towards a presidentialized working mode, even in the absence of formal institutional changes. These developments can be explained by a combination of long-term structural changes in modern politics and societies’ contingent factors that fluctuate over time. While these contingent, short-term...

This paper deals with the relationship between election campaign innovation and organisational change within parties. Using the case of the British Labour Party, the paper considers how far campaign changes of the past few years entail the organisational transformation of the party. Broadly speaking, it seems reasonable to conclude that the profess...

This article seeks to examine evidence of the existence and growth of anti-party sentiment in the UK. While it is clear that the available data cannot unambiguously confirm these phenomena, at least a prima facie case can be made on the basis of such evidence. Regression analysis suggests that while erosion of the class cleavage in the country is a...

This study reviews the case for the often-claimed crisis of party in established democracies, and argues that such a contention rests at least in part on ambiguous evidence. Consequently, there is an urgent need for research that provides a better understanding of citizen attitudes towards democratic institutions and processes. An interesting examp...

Shows that the politics of democratic societies is moving towards a presidentialized working mode, even in the absence of formal institutional changes. These developments can be explained by a combination of long-term structural changes in modern politics and societies’ contingent factors that fluctuate over time. While these contingent, short-term...

Party employees are an under-researched group in political science. This article begins to address this oversight by examining Labour Party employees using new quantitative and qualitative data. It argues that party employment should be regarded as a form of political participation and as a consequence, existing models of political participation ca...

This review of the current state of British party politics considers the prospects for realignment of the Westminster party system. In view of the problems that Labour faces in office and the continuing entrenched crisis which confronts the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats have been presented with historically favourable conditions in which to...

This article analyses party employees, one of the most under-researched subjects in the study of British political parties. We draw on a blend of quantitative and qualitative data in order to shed light on the social and political profiles of Labour Party staff, and on the question of their professionalisation. The latter theme is developed through...

2001 was self-evidently a significant year for party politics in the UK by simple fact that it was a general election year. This article seeks to provide an overview of party competition and dynamics during the election campaign and subsequently. In particular, it focuses on party system dynamics across the UK as a whole and within each of the devo...

This is a broad cross‐national study of the role of political parties in contemporary democracies. Leading scholars in the field assess the evidence for partisan decline or adaptation for 20 OECD nations. This book documents the broadscale erosion of the public's partisan identities in virtually all advanced industrial democracies. It demonstrates...

Shows that the politics of democratic societies is moving towards a presidentialized working mode, even in the absence of formal institutional changes. These developments can be explained by a combination of long-term structural changes in modern politics and societies’ contingent factors that fluctuate over time. While these contingent, short-term...

This article focuses on two aspects of the Blair government's programme of institutional modernisation which affected party politics in the UK in the year 2000. The first is the consolidation of devolved party systems stemming from the reform of subcentral government, while the second is the introduction of a radically new regulatory framework for...

A variety of evidence suggests that political parties in western Europe have been encountering significant (and in one or two cases severe) problems of public disenchantment. This seems to stem from two broad sources: first, a widespread sense that they are failing in the performance of some of the classic political functions attributed to them, an...

The study of comparative politics suggests that, while Russia is undeniably unique, and while it would be naive to expect cues for research always to be provided by studies of Western and Eastern and Central European parties, a greater emphasis should be placed on research into party organization and institutionalization in Russia. This would achie...

This article builds a picture of attitudinal groups both within and across British parliamentary parties. It illustrates how this can be achieved through a cluster analysis of British Candidate Survey data, the clusters being defined in terms of core political beliefs and attitudes towards European integration. This approach serves to shed light on...

This article seeks to examine evidence that British political parties may be in decline. A two-dimensional framework for analysis is utilized, which suggests that the overall picture is far from unambiguous. At most, a prima facie case can be made that the popular legitimacy of parties may be dwindling; similarly, party organizations only appear we...