Participating Locally and Nationally: Explaining the Offline and Online Activism of British Party Members
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321718794740 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718794740
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(3) 658 –675
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321718794740
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Participating Locally and
Nationally: Explaining the
Offline and Online Activism of
British Party Members
Tim Bale1, Paul Webb2
and Monica Poletti1
Abstract
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. While the well-established general incentives
theory of participation continues to offer a useful basis for explaining both types of campaign
activism, we find that our understanding is significantly enhanced by considering the impact of
national and local political contexts. Whereas the former chiefly adds explanatory value to the
model of online participation by party members, the latter considerably improves the model of
offline participation.
Keywords
party members, campaigning, activism, online
Accepted: 25 July 2018
There is a small but nonetheless significant association between parties’ activity and their
electoral performance (André and Depauw, 2016; Fisher and Denver, 2009; Johnston and
Pattie, 2003; Karp et al., 2008) Research also suggests that party members in particular
make a difference (Seyd and Whiteley, 1992: 195–200) – not surprisingly, perhaps, since
it is they who provide a good deal (although not necessarily the bulk (see Fisher et al.,
2014; Scarrow, 2014: 103–109; Webb et al., 2017)) of the voluntary workers who run
phone banks, deliver leaflets, and canvass door-to-door in the run-up to the election, and
then remind people to vote and even help them get to the polling stations on election day
itself. Indeed, it is these campaign activities – along with contributing funds, playing
1School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
2Department of Politics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Corresponding author:
Tim Bale, SPIR, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: t.bale@qmul.ac.uk
794740PSX0010.1177/0032321718794740Political StudiesBale et al.
research-article2018
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Bale et al. 659
some role in policy formation, being ‘ambassadors in the community’, providing a pool
of recruits for elected office and providing a degree of legitimacy for what would other-
wise be transparently hollow organizations – that are at the heart of what members sup-
posedly do for their parties (Scarrow, 1994).
If members are central to these campaign efforts, then we clearly need to understand
what drives their willingness to engage in such activity. That is the aim of this article. As
part of a wider project on contemporary party membership in the United Kingdom, we
made a point of surveying members within a week or so of the general election in the
hope that respondents’ recall of what they did during the campaign would be accurate. In
this article, we describe what members do for their parties during the heat of battle and
explain what might drive the range of activities they undertake. In particular, we seek to
add value to the best-known specific model of activism among party members, the
‘General Incentives Model’ (GIM), first introduced in the pioneering work of Patrick
Seyd and Paul Whiteley (Seyd and Whiteley, 1992; Whiteley et al., 1994, 2005; Whiteley
and Seyd, 1998) by testing how the model performs with new modes of online campaign-
ing, as well as with more traditional campaign activities. We show that, while still valu-
able, the GIM is no longer fully serviceable in an era of social media communication and
campaigning. We proceed to reveal how different types of activity are rooted in local and
national contexts. Specifically, we demonstrate that it is necessary to distinguish between
‘online’ and ‘offline’ forms of campaign activism, since – over and above general incen-
tives – campaigning ‘in real life’ is driven to a significant extent by local party and con-
stituency factors, whereas online campaigning is not.
Theoretical Approach
In attempting to describe and explain the range of campaign activity of British party
members, we start by briefly describing the GIM. Introduced by Seyd and Whiteley
(1992) a generation ago, it covered (but was not confined to) campaign activity, and
was grounded in the assumption that participation occurs in response to different kinds
of incentives. While this model has widely been found to be useful in explaining the
decision to join a party (Poletti et al., 2018) and to be active within it – and indeed we
will confirm the continuing value of most of its elements in our own data in due course
– we would nevertheless argue that we need to go beyond general incentives to gain a
fuller understanding of what motivates party members’ campaign activism today. In the
second decade of the twenty-first century, social media is part and parcel of the reper-
toire of contemporary political participation, along with more traditional party cam-
paign activities. The use of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and other
forms of digital communication mean that it has become increasingly common for citi-
zens to publicize political information and messages on behalf of and about candidates
and parties – and of course to discuss them. In this way, they can participate in cam-
paigns in a meaningful way even if the full extent of the effects of online participation
remains unclear at present (Di Gennaro and Dutton, 2006; Freezel, 2016; Visser and
Stolle, 2014). On one hand, this development leads us to wonder whether the GIM is
still a valid tool for capturing the incentives that lead members to participate in modern
forms of online campaign as well as in more traditional ones. On the other hand, it gives
us the chance to better understand the influence of a geographical dimension linked to
different types of party experience which might affect these two types of political
campaigning.
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