Commissioned Book Review: Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Monica Poletti, Footsoldiers: Party Membership in the Twenty-First Century
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920901958 |
| Author | Lawrence McKay |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(2) NP15 –NP16
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
901958PSW0010.1177/1478929920901958Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2020
Commissioned Book Review
Footsoldiers: Party Membership in the
Twenty-First Century by Tim Bale, Paul Webb
and Monica Poletti. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.
202 pp., £19.99 (Paperback). ISBN 9781138302464.
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 accom-
plished and accessible book. Footsoldiers will
prove a perfect primer for those requiring an
introduction – from undergraduate to postgrad-
uate – 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 excel-
lent data-collection effort, spanning six politi-
cal parties and surveys across 3 years (and two
general elections). The authors create a useful
sense of continuity with earlier studies, opera-
tionalising and measuring variables in ways
that are conventional in the literature. Where
necessary, however, they take creative meas-
ures to solve new questions. In particular, to
address the neglected area of ‘quitters’, they
use open-ended responses to design an intui-
tive 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 overwhelm-
ing through sheer volume of data.
The book is insightful on how party mem-
bers ‘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, partic-
ularly 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 com-
parisons for voters’ and members’ political val-
ues, so we are left in some doubt as to how well
this translates ideologically. There is nonethe-
less a timely and useful analysis of Brexit posi-
tions, 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 ques-
tion how far this is driven by the deliberate
preferences of members, compared to the ero-
sion 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 dealign-
ment, 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 cap-
tured by ‘internal’ efficacy.
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