Research corner: the non-member campaign army Welcome to the latest in my occasional series highlighting interesting findings from academic research. This time, it is a guest piece from Justin Fisher at Brunel on the importance of non-members to election campaigns. Over the last three general elections in our studies of constituency-level campaigns, we’ve been collecting data on the level of campaign involvement by non-party members. This has been a fascinating exercise for many reasons. First, while we had an inkling that the practice was quite widespread (which is why we started collecting the data), we had no idea of the scale. Second, it suggested to us that if there was a large body of people campaigning who hadn’t signed on the dotted line, this would cause us to re-evaluate what we understood about parties and party members. The traditional understanding of parties was that campaigning was undertaken by members. In return, parties granted these members participatory rights. But if large numbers of people were getting involved in campaigns without joining parties, this would represent a significant challenge to our understanding of the dynamics of parties. When we ran the analysis of our data from the 2010 election, we were stunned. On average 78% of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat campaigns had recruited non-members to help out. The numbers for the Lib Dems were even higher – 86%. Not only that, these non-members formed a significant proportion of each local party’s campaign force – a mean of eighteen per local party. We went on to write a detailed academic article about all this, giving it a title of which I’m still proud – Members Are Not the Only Fruit. Around the same time, we discovered that other academics were starting to capture this phenomenon in research around the world, and a broad consensus began to emerge – namely that the culture of the party was an explanation as to why some parties were more successful than others in recruiting non-members to help out. This made a lot of sense in the British context. The Lib Dems’ traditional and ideological commitment to community politics, together with research that showed the similarities in the ideological profile of Lib Dem members and voters, suggested a strong explanation for success in recruiting these campaign helpers. But our view changed significantly when we repeated our study at the 2015 election. While the proportion of local Conservative and Labour parties recruiting non-members was little changed, the impact of electoral unpopularity on the Lib Dems’ ability to recruit non-members was stark. While in 2010, 86% of Lib Dem local parties were able to recruit non-members, in 2015, the figure was just 45%. Members may not have been the only fruit, but they were more likely to be around to campaign when the going got tougher. Our new data from the 2017 election show that the situation has only improved marginally for the Lib Dems – some 49% of local parties were able to recruit non-members, while the situation for the Conservative and Labour parties was not radically different from 2015. While a great success story for the Lib Dems has been recruiting many new members since 2015, the party is not yet repeating that with people who don’t want to sign on the dotted line, but still want to help out. So what have we learned from three elections-worth of data? It’s very clear that the notion that it is only members who campaign is outdated (even if it was ever entirely true). Non-members form a significant part of local parties’ campaigns. Indeed, in Labour’s most marginal seats in 2017, there were, on average, fifty-nine non-members assisting. What this doesn’t mean, however, is that parties no longer need formal members. As we’ve seen, electoral unpopularity is a poor recruiting Sergeant for non-members. Moreover, while non-member campaign activity is essential, it tends to be focused more on activities such as leaflet delivery than on meeting voters – the latter is much more likely to be undertaken by members. So, parties cannot do without members. But equally, successful campaigns also rely on recruiting people who want to help your party, but don’t want to sign-up. The challenge for all parties is engaging these people as well as recruiting formal members. That point about how much more the Liberal Democrats still need to do to restore the party’s organisational strength is a theme taking up in the pamphlet I co-authored, Reinventing the Liberal Democrats.