Skip Navigation


Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on January 21, 2009
Parliamentary Affairs 2009 62(2):227-241; doi:10.1093/pa/gsn053
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
62/2/227    most recent
gsn053v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Thorpe, A.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following Parliamentary Affairs issue: ANALYSING PARTY ACTIVISM [View the issue table of contents]

Reconstructing Conservative Party Membership in World War II Britain1

Andrew Thorpe

University of Exeter
UK

Correspondence: a.j.thorpe{at}ex.ac.uk

The reconstruction of past trends in party membership can be fraught, especially when parties themselves kept no aggregate records. This was the case with the British Conservative party prior to 1946. The aggregate figures never existed, and the data that would be required to construct no longer exist to the required extent. Nonetheless, this article argues that it is methodologically possible to offer more detailed analysis than hitherto, by analysing local as well as national-level Conservative sources, triangulating with the national-level Labour party statistics and taking insights from more explicitly political science literature. This paper's substantive argument is that although Conservative membership fell after 1939, it did not collapse; that it recovered somewhat from early 1943 onwards and that recovery then afforded the party a base from which it was able to build, with spectacular success after 1945.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.