Abstract
What motivates a political party to develop overseas development volunteering projects for members? How do such activities affect individual volunteers and the party, more broadly? To address these questions, this paper analyses the UK Conservative Party’s international development volunteering projects. Our data comprise 38 interviews with former volunteers and participant observation of one volunteering project in Rwanda in 2017 by one author. This predominantly self-reported data are supplemented with publicly available sources. We draw on employer-supported and state-supported volunteering literature to develop a framework for analysing drivers and effects of party-supported volunteering. We argue that political parties are under-researched sending communities, and that development volunteering constitutes a strategic resource that can be invoked to legitimise engagement with, and authority in, international development as part of the everyday political identity of Party members. As such, how volunteering is used to signal authority in a policy area warrants further research.
Highlights
Political parties often rely on volunteers to generate support and visibility for candidates during elections and to mobilise communities around local campaigns (LeesMarchment and Pettitt 2014)
We argue that political parties are under-researched sending communities, and that development volunteering constitutes a strategic resource that can be invoked to legitimise engagement with, and authority in, international development as part of the everyday political identity of Party members
We argue that partaking in development volunteering projects has legitimised and normalised engagement with international development as part of the everyday political identity of Party members
Summary
Political parties often rely on volunteers to generate support and visibility for candidates during elections and to mobilise communities around local campaigns (LeesMarchment and Pettitt 2014). Increased support for development aid is one of a range of impacts that may be applicable to the Conservative Party but, as explained above, this project is limited to providing new insights into the self-reported motives behind the Conservative Party’s volunteering initiatives (RQ 1), self-reported impacts on volunteers corroborated with anecdotal evidence, self-reported impacts on the Party (RQ 2), and an interrogation into how the claims of impacts are used to project authority and legitimacy in a party-political setting (RQ 3) Despite these limitations, this paper makes an original contribution through its unique focus on a political party as a sending community. Following a discussion of methods we will explore what our new empirical data reveal about these expectations and effects in the case of Umubano and, to a lesser extent, Maja
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