British Political Parties Research Articles

Politics and Parenthood: An Examination of UK Party Leadership Elections

As women increasingly campaign for the highest political offices, this original content analysis study examines the extent to which gender and parenthood play a role in political leadership using British political party leadership elections as a case study. Competing hypotheses from the limited literature on politics and parenthood are examined. The article finds that family mentions have varied over time and contrary to some gender literature men’s family was at times of greater interest than women’s. Evidence is found for the politicisation of motherhood and a possible ‘maternal mandate’. In parallel, fatherhood was of increasing interest and the rise of the modern man can be seen. Yet, male candidates appear to have an ‘opt-out clause’ in any politicisation of fatherhood. Further questions about politics and parenthood begged by this article open future research avenues.

Friends with benefits: A temporal comparison of electoral pact negotiations in the British context

Electoral pacts between British political parties have been mooted more often than folk memory or current academic literature would suggest. There has been little attempt to tackle them empirically, and comparative theory on pre-electoral coalitions is formative at best. This article uses a comparative framework to historically trace three cases where pre-electoral coalitions have been seriously discussed by British political parties – one that was eventually fully operational, and two that ultimately were not formed. It posits a strong role for party leaders and elite-level dynamics in explaining the success and failure of negotiations between parties, and finds them to be an enduring example of intra-party collective decision making. There also exists a clear divide between success and failure in negotiations dependent on whether pacts are perceived to be electorally expedient, or intrinsically damaging to short and long-term party goals. These are based on contrasting interpretive standpoints on the constraints of Westminster and voter perceptions of coalitions.

INFLUENCE OF REFERENDUM 2016 ABOUT BREXIT ON CAREER OF DEFINITE BRITISH POLITICIANS FROM NON-RULING PARTIES

The purpose of given article is to consider the influence of the referendum 2016 on exit of the UK from the European union (EU) on position of leaders of some British political parties. Given article is based on the British parliament’s data of, data from the official site of the Labour Party and on the British press articles. The historical-genetic or descriptive method is used as the basic method of the research. This article considers the influence of the British referendum 2016 on the career of the leaders of the various British political parties. It shows the internal political struggle for the leader’s place. It is noticed that the most dramatic struggle was in oppositional Labour party which splited on a top of party and the leader supported by ordinary Labour members. The first have raised the question about a vote of no confidence because of their dissatisfaction with the leader’s activity, the second have supported the leader who as a result has won the Labour party’s elections. As for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) there was a change of the leader at his own desire, and struggle was not such sharp, but it took place after the resignation of the leader. It is underlined that other parties were not influenced by the referendum 2016 results because they or are either in decline, or their have minimum political influence. As a conclusion the British referendum 2016 is said to have become the catalyst of political strike, nominal because of it has not occurred or there was a change of leaders.

Mapping the Demos: The Scientisation of the Political, Electoral Research and Dutch Political Parties, c. 1900–1980

The ‘scientisation of the political’, understood as the increasing influence of social science within twentieth century (party) politics, provides insight into politicians’ conceptions of political representation and the shifts in those conceptions over time. Social science based knowledge exerted a profound effect on how parties approached political identity formation and on their perceptions of the electorate. Based on a Dutch case study, this article tracks the impact of electoral geography and mass psychology and, from the 1940s onwards, electoral research and polling data on party strategies, showing the important role played by party political think tanks which acted as hubs of social-scientific knowledge. Comparisons with British and West German political parties reveal the complex reception and negotiation of social scientific insights regarding the nature and behaviour of the electorate, as well as the persistence of ingrained stereotypes.

Book Review: Simon Griffiths and Kevin Hickson, British Party Politics and Ideology After New Labour

Book Review: Simon Griffiths and Kevin Hickson, <i>British Party Politics and Ideology After New Labour</i>

The Supply and Demand Model of Candidate Selection: Some Reflections

This contribution takes a look back at the supply and demand model of selection and recruitment, developed by Joni Lovenduski and Pippa Norris in Political Recruitment: Gender, Race and Class in the British Parliament (1995). The core understanding of this model was that candidate selection was an interactive process in which both selectors and aspirants affected outcomes that were organized in several sets of institutions. The model illuminates power in particular institutions – British political parties – and was designed to examine the various effects of the selection process. This contribution reflects on the model and puts forward ideas and arguments about what might be done differently, taking into account the theoretical and methodological innovations of the succeeding generation of scholars who have used the model. It also identifies remaining challenges for research on candidate selection and suggests that the supply and demand model is sufficiently flexible that it can still travel across national, system and party boundaries.

The Travails of Identity Change: Competitor Claims and Distinctiveness of British Political Parties, 1970–1992

How does an organization change its identity, yet maintain distinctiveness? This question is especially interesting when we consider the fact that identity repositioning often takes place among several organizations at the same time—giving rise to interrelated identity change and distinctiveness concerns. We investigate this question in the setting of British political parties, during a period when questions of identity change and distinctiveness were heightened, following a decline of political ideologies. Parties, we argue, sought to handle this situation through two broad strategies that we call identity affirmation and reformation. Identity distinctiveness was affirmed by identity claims that sought to counter and neutralize competing claims on aspects that were thought central to the identity of the party. To alter the identity, parties also sought to reform it by expanding identity claims to elements that were considered to be popular. Reformation efforts are however not unchecked expansion, but tempered by concerns of identity consistency and distance from other parties. We discuss contributions to theories of organizational identities and competitive rivalry.

Resourcing the constituency campaign in the UK

First-past-the-post electoral rules create strong incentives for parties to focus their campaigns on key marginal seats and much research has been devoted to the vote-winning potential of such activity. Less attention has been given to local party organisations’ ability to mount these campaigns, however. We therefore examine recent evidence of British political parties’ local campaigning capacities. Overall, Britain’s grassroots party organisations are struggling. While some local parties are resource-rich, many are not: only half of all Conservative and fewer than one in six Labour and Liberal Democrat constituency parties had an annual turnover in 2010 exceeding £25,000. Many local parties are seriously under-resourced: funds are limited, donations meagre, and members few. For most local parties, campaign resources depend primarily on their own local fund-raising initiatives – but their yields tend to be low. Even in key marginal constituencies, many local parties increasingly struggle to resource their campaign activities. What is more, there are substantial variations between the various political parties in the relative health of their constituency operations, and in the national parties’ abilities to subsidise local activities in strategically important seats. The implications for local voter mobilisation efforts in the UK are not good.

Activist model of political party growth

The membership of British political parties has a direct influence on their political effectiveness. This paper applies the mathematics of epidemiology to the analysis of the growth and decline of such memberships. The party members are divided into activists and inactive members, where all activists influence the quality of party recruitment, but only a subset of activists recruit and thus govern numerical growth. The activists recruit for only a limited period, which acts as a restriction on further party growth. This Limited Activist model is applied to post-war and recent memberships of the Labour, Scottish National and Conservative parties. The model reproduces data trends, and relates realistically to historical narratives. It is concluded that the political parties analysed are not in danger of extinction but experience repeated periods of growth and decline in membership, albeit at lower numbers than in the past.

The General Rejection? Political Disengagement, Disaffected Democrats and ‘Doing Politics’ Differently: Table 15.1

In the run up to the 2015 General Election Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative MP who defected to UKIP in 2014, reflected on the growth of anti-politics and argued that British political parties seemed to resemble ‘Kodak parties’. He drew from arguments made in his book The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy that identified the need for an ‘old politics’ to keep pace with a ‘new politics’ that was being driven by exactly those processes of social, economic and technical change that have been identified as ‘liquid modernity’. Carswell’s argument is that the Kodak brand was once synonymous with cameras and from the moment George Eastman launched the first Kodak camera in 1888 Kodak had a dominant market share. By the 1970s, more than 90% of camera film products sold in the USA were made by Kodak to the extent that people even spoke of taking family photographs as capturing that ‘Kodak moment’. Then came digital cameras and in 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy. Political parties were once synonymous with democratic politics but their social position and role has clearly changed from the mass-based organisations of the twentieth century. Carswell diagnoses a failure of British political institutions to keep pace with the expectations and demands of an increasingly diverse society and that exists to some extent beyond the reach of the public—the demos. It is in this context that this chapter reflects on the 2015

The Party Leadership Model: An early forecast of the 2015 British General Election

British political parties select their leaders to win elections. The winning margin of the party leader among the selectorate reflects how likely they think she is to win the General Election. The present research compares the winning margins of party leaders in their party leadership elections and uses the results of this comparison to predict that the party leader with the larger winning margin will become the next Prime Minister. I term this process “the Party Leadership Model”. The model correctly forecasts 8 out of 10 past elections, while making these forecasts 4 years in advance on average. According to a Bayesian analysis, there is a 95 per cent probability that having the larger winning margin in party leadership elections increases the chances of winning the General Election. Because David Cameron performed better among Conservative MPs in 2005 than Ed Miliband did among Labour MPs in 2010, the model predicts Cameron to become Prime Minister again in 2015. The Bayesian calculation puts his chances of re-election at 75 per cent.

Currents in the Cross-Legal: Recontextualizing Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy

Though Terence Rattigan’s reputation as a playwright has successfully been revived in recent years, critical responses to the plays – The Winslow Boy (1946) being a case in point – remain limited to the perspectives of British theatre history and British party politics. Paying particular attention to ‘cross-legal’ parallels between The Winslow Boy and a variety of historical and fictional analogues, Alex Feldman restores the play to a broader frame of reference, and to some of its original contexts of production and reception. First considering Rattigan’s juvenile dramatic forays into the law, including his adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, he proceeds to explore archival evidence of The Winslow Boy’s European reception, pursuing parallels drawn by reviewers with the Nuremberg trials, the Dreyfus case, and Heinrich von Kleist’s 1811 novella, Michael Kohlhaas, re-positioning The Winslow Boy within the transnational and transhistorical legal imaginary to which it properly belongs. Alex Feldman is an Assistant Professor of English at MacEwan University in Alberta. His first book, Dramas of the Past on the Twentieth-Century Stage: in History’s Wings, was published by Routledge in 2012.

The Conservative Party and Ulster Unionism: A Case of Elective Affinity

This article engages with the perennial matter of the relationship between ideas and interests in British party politics, in particular that relationship within Conservative and Unionist politics. After a preliminary consideration of the contemporary understanding of ideology as complex and fluid rather than fixed and settled, the article examines a way of capturing paradoxical aspects of ideological thinking—that it is self-chosen or the result of a changing perspective and yet also apparently natural or in Conservative terms, ‘common sense’. It does so by exploring the intellectual lineage of ‘elective affinity’ and assesses its value for understanding how political identities not only endure but also how those identities change. An attempt is made to give some substance to that understanding by viewing through that lens of elective affinity the association between Conservatives and Ulster Unionists in its historical, ideological and institutional contexts.

‘British Rights for British Citizens’: The Campaign for ‘Equal Citizenship’ for Northern Ireland

This essay traces the evolution of the demand that the principal British political parties should extend organisation to Northern Ireland. Although originally nurtured by a small Stalinist sect of the far left, the ideal of electoral integration or ‘equal citizenship’ would in time come to exercise considerable appeal among middle-class unionists disorientated by the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. This unlikely political alliance would give rise to a vibrant pressure group—the Campaign for Equal Citizenship (CEC)—which played a vocal role in Northern Irish political life in the late 1980s. While often vaunted as its essential attribute, the political diversity of the CEC would foster divisions that would ensure its swift demise. The paper concludes that the decline of electoral integrationism in the early 1990s represented perhaps a prerequisite of a nascent peace process that envisaged a very different political future for Northern Ireland.

The Meretriciousness of Meritocracy

Meritocracy has become the creed of all three British political parties. There is a consensus that progress towards it has stalled. In fact, it is doubtful how widespread the advance to meritocracy ever was and how far short of achieving it Britain fell. In any case, meritocracy, if it is not accompanied by greater equality of outcome, would not promote a happier society. It would make the rich more unrestrained in their greed and the poor more miserable thinking their poverty their own fault.

Manipulating Territories: British Political Parties and New Parliamentary Constituencies

In 2011 the UK Parliament introduced a new set of rules and timetable for the redistribution of Parliamentary constituencies, which also included a new procedure for public consultation on the Boundary Commissions' proposals. The first redistribution under this new regime began in 2011, and an extensive series of Public Hearings and submission of written representations took place in late 2011 and early 2012. During the consultation, the political parties—as under the previous regimes—sought changes to the proposals that would better serve their electoral interests. This paper evaluates the extent to which their counter-proposals were able to achieve that end, given the reduced degrees of freedom provided by the new rules and other geographical constraints. At best, each party might have been able to change the number of seats it might win by about 10–12, out of 600.

Peering in from the window ledge of the Union: the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the attempt to bring British Conservatism to Northern Ireland

In this article I examine one particular way in which the Anglo-Irish Agreement redefined unionist politics in the late 1980s. While the operation of “direct rule” had drawn the unionist middle classes ever closer to Britain in economic and cultural terms, it had also left them in a precarious position politically. The nature and scale of this political subservience was brought home dramatically in 1985 when the British government signed an international agreement giving the Dublin government the right to be consulted on Northern Irish affairs. In the period of political flux summoned by the Hillsborough Accord, elements of the unionist middle classes were drawn to the previously marginal ideas of a small leftist organisation that argued for the British political parties to organise in the region. Given the material interests and social conservatism of those attracted to it, the call for “equal citizenship” would inevitably take the form primarily of a movement seeking to bring British Conservatism to Northern Ireland.

History, Heritage and Tradition in Contemporary British Politics: Past Politics and Present Histories. By Emily Robinson.

In his film, The Attic, Adam Curtis argued that Margaret Thatcher became so deeply attached to a romanticised view of the nation’s past that it undermined her understanding of contemporary reality. History, Heritage and Tradition in Contemporary British Politics makes much the same argument in the opposite way; it details how, since the Thatcher era, party politics has drawn heavily on the rhetoric of the past for purposes that are reductively presentist. The book, in short, poses the question ‘what did the “End of History” era do to the ways in which British party politics interacted with history’? Two chapters ‘ideology and temporality’ and ‘structures of memory’ are used to orientate the three extended case studies that chart the rise of political ‘presentism’ in the Conservative Party, during the rise of Social Democratic Party (SDP) and New Labour, and finally at the demise of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: Understanding British Party Politics

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: Understanding British Party Politics

‘Superior to anything I had seen in the States’: the ‘Thatcherisation’ of Republican strategy in 1980 and 1984

The collaboration and exchange of ideas and tactics between American and British political parties is a well-established and accepted fact of political life. This article examines a previously marginalised aspect of the transatlantic relationship in the Margaret Thatcher–Ronald Reagan epoch, namely the extent to which the Conservative Party's electioneering in 1979 and 1983 influenced the presidential campaigns to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Just as Thatcher and Reagan shared a ‘special relationship’ in foreign affairs, their respective campaigns also had much in common as each sought to secure power in similar circumstances. Whereas previous work has focused on the extent of the ‘Americanisation’ of British political campaigns, the extent of British influence, particularly that of Thatcher and of the Conservative Party's innovations, has been a relatively neglected issue. Thus, this article contributes to the ‘Americanisation’ debate by proposing that Republican electioneering in the 1980s was ...