So who really does the donkey work

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. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that non members who strongly support a party may do even more than those who actually join it. This paper examines how different actors contributed to the electoral campaigns of six parties at the 2015 UK General Election. It uses new survey data covering not only members of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, United Kingdom Independence, Scottish Nationalist, and Green parties but also, firstly, voters who identified themselves as being close to one of those parties but did not formally belong to them and, secondly, those belonging to trade unions officially affiliated to the Labour Party. As well as exploring how much work they do during campaigns, we ask whether the three groups choose different activities and are differently motivated. We find that, at the individual level, party members do more than union members or non member supporters, and that this is especially true of more intensive forms of activity. We also find that constituency context and political attitudes influence levels of activity, although there is no consistent impact from demographic factors. At the aggregate level, we estimate that the campaign work done by supporters and trade union members may match or even exceed that done by party members.  A good ground game may not be everything but it still means something. In a tight race, it may even mean the difference between a party winning and losing an election, especially in the UK, a country carved up into single member constituencies operating under the plurality rule (Johnston and Pattie, 2003; Karp, Banducci and Bowler, 2008; Fisher and Denver, 2009; Andre and Depauw, 2015; Johnston, Pattie, Scully and Cutts, 2016) But if 'boots on the ground' are at least potentially important, who is it who wears them and why? And what exactly do they do once they've donned them? The answer to the first question has traditionally been obvious: grassroots members of political parties. The answer to the second no less so: delivering leaflets, putting up posters, holding meetings and canvassing voters and then getting them to the polling stations. But what if all this no longer holds? Given (a) the almost ubiquitous decline in the number of people joining political parties (van Biezen, Mair and Poguntke, 2012) (b) those parties' more or possibly less (Faucher, 2015) reluctant accommodation to that decline, and (c) the simultaneous rise of new communication technologies, there is good reason to suppose things might have changed. There is also some evidence to suggest that they have. A recent British study, using data collected in 2010 from parties' election agents, found, for instance, that 'although members clearly still matter, they are not the only source of voluntary activity, especially in election campaigns' so much so that [o]ver three quarters of constituency (district level) campaigns in Britain recruited supporters in 2010 and on average, supporters engaged in around two thirds of the activities of members' (Fisher, Fieldhouse and Cutts, 2014: 91 2; see also Scarrow, 2015: 103 109 and, on Australia, Gauja and Jackson 2015: 912) And while another recent study discovered that the British lag some way behind their American cousins when it comes to contacting voters online, it also noted that the potential is clearly there (Aldrich et al. forthcoming) It is more than possible, of course, that these two things are related in the sense of new technologies enabling and perhaps even encouraging campaigning activity by people who are not necessarily members of the party with which they identify (see Gibson, 2015) In a recent paper (Bale, Webb and Poletti, 2015) we made use of surveys of the members of six British political parties conducted just after the 2015 general election not just to detail what they did for their parties during the campaign but also to explain what drove them to do what they did. At the same time as conducting those surveys, however, we also surveyed some of the same parties' strongest supporters people who felt a strong sense of partisan identification but who were not themselves members as well as members of trade unions affiliated to the Labour Party. Our aim in this paper is, firstly, to compare the scope, frequency and intensity of the campaigning activities of the three groups and, secondly, to see whether they are similarly or differently motivated. In general, we find that at the individual level party members are much more likely to campaign for their preferred parties than either union members or nonmember supporters, and that this is especially true of the more intensive forms of activity. We also find that constituency context (ie, the marginality of a seat) and the political attitudes of respondents (especially social liberalism, postmaterialism and feelings about the EU) influence levels of activity, although demographic factors bear no consistent connection with it. This notwithstanding, however, the considerably greater numbers of non member supporters and trade unionists in the population mean that the sum of campaign activity undertaken by these groups may match or even outweigh that of party members at the aggregate level. Members and supporters at elections: What we know The most recent and the most detailed study so far of the contributions made at elections by both members and supporters of British political parties is the research carried out, using surveys of constituency parties at the 2010 election, by Fisher, Fieldhouse and Cutts (2014) work which builds both upon the work of Denver, Hands and Fisher (2001) and on the seminal work on British party members of Paul Whiteley and Patrick Seyd. The main argument put forward by Fisher, Fieldhouse and Cutts (2014: 79) is that 'many of the roles of members outlined by Seyd and Whiteley may now not be their exclusive preserve' not least because 'supporters can become involved in election campaigns, assisting with the mobilization of the vote and political communication. They also note (2014: 77) that, in particular, 'Labour's party structure, which includes affiliated trade unions, suggests that an exclusive focus on formal individual members could be missing something. Observing that in 2010 '78 per cent of local Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties recruited some supporters to help with the campaign' (Fisher, Fieldhouse and Cutts, 2014: 81) they asked four key questions (the first and the last two being of most interest to us) namely: 1. To what extent do supporters engage in similar activities to those of members? 2. To what extent is supporter activity a function of existing active local parties? 3. Are the levels [of] supporter activity predicted in a similar way to levels of member activity? 4. Do supporters make an independent positive contribution to constituency campaigns? When it came to the first question, they found the following (p.83) On the one hand, it is clear that to some extent, party supporters engaged to varying degrees in the same activities as party members, and in the case of delivering leaflets (the activity in which all parties made most effort) to a virtually identical degree. Equally, supporters were quite likely to staff polling stations relative to members, and were perhaps surprisingly likely to be involved at the campaign headquarters, despite not being formal members. However, in respect of other activities where voters were contacted either on the doorstep or by telephone, supporters were less likely to be involved than members. They concluded (2014: 84) that, 'on average, [supporters put in] around two thirds of the effort' and that this was plainly 'nontrivial' As to whether the levels [of] supporter activity could be predicted in a similar way to levels of member activity, they found that the prospect of victory or possible defeat in a seat prompted more activity from both members and supporters (Fisher, Fieldhouse and Cutts, 2014: 86) When, however, it came to demographics (which they examined at a constituency level, note, not at an individual level) they found that there was no consistent pattern across members and supporters, or across the various parties. For the Conservatives, the proportions of graduates and owner occupiers in a constituency predicted the campaign input of members, while the proportion of manual workers influenced the activity of supporters. For Labour, an ethnically diverse population was a significant predictor of member activity, but population density correlated with supporter activity. Several features of the constituency's demographic profile (an ethnically diverse population and proportions of graduates, owner occupiers and council or housing association tenants) impacted on the campaign activity of Liberal Democrat supporters but none of these mattered to the party's members (ibid. 86 89) They also picked up differences due to what they refer to as 'political' drivers, by which they meant the presence of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) candidates (which boosted Conservative supporter activity but not member activity) or women candidates (which correlated positively with Labour members' activism, but not with that of their supporters) To these findings, we can now add our own on the campaign activities of party members at the 2015 election data gathered not at the level of constituency parties but at the level of the individual members and supporters themselves. In an earlier study, we used the party members' data to test a number of hypotheses, some of which are derived from Seyd and Whiteley's 'general incentives' model (Bale, Webb Poletti 2015) Along with certain attitudinal, demographic and constituency variables, the general incentives factors largely perfor