Why socials are vital to campaigning?

The role of social events in building up a party's election-fighting abilities is becoming a much debated issue in the Liberal Democrats following the success of the #LibDemPint meetups. Are they a great way of introducing new people to the party or do they become a distraction from what a party should be about?

Robin Pettitt, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Kingston University, has been doing some very relevant research on this topic. So I invited him to write about his research findings so far for Lib Dem Newswire:

It is widely agreed that local door-to-door campaigning by volunteer activists is key to electoral success. It is clearly not a panacea, but both academic research and the day-to-day work of political parties show that it can have a significant effect.

However, there has been virtually no research on how political parties strive to recruit and retain the volunteer activists that are at the heart of local campaigning. Political party organisers have no doubt thought and written a lot on this topic, but academia has yet to examine the issue. There is a lot of research on volunteer management in other voluntary organisations, but little to nothing on political parties. My research by aims to cover this gap in our knowledge. The research is based on interviews with party organisers, candidates and local office holders from the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party.

The very early and preliminary results from the first round of interviews suggest one of the most important tools available to local organisers to keep volunteers active is the social side of campaigning - i.e. the enjoyment of spending time with like minded individuals.

As one interviewee said: "The key to our branch's success is probably alcohol - it's the pub". Another said: "One thing we do a lot is to make sure to go to a nice pub with the candidate after a campaign event, and talk to the activists. So, you build that sense of team. That is hugely important." Several other comments from other interviews echoed this view. It appears that what often gets people started on volunteering is support for a party's policies and ideology - but what keeps people going is socialising with fellow activists.

This reliance on the social side of campaigning as a retention strategy has several consequences, chief amongst which are:

• Reversing a decline in activism can only be achieved by people locally rather than by party HQ. A pleasant social atmosphere has to be grown naturally at the local level. Policies and procedures handed down from the centre are unlikely to achieve that.
• Socialising as an incentive for activism relies heavily on having the right kind of people in the local party. You cannot train people to be sociable and if a local party is dominated by an insular core group of activists, growth becomes almost impossible.
• Any loss of activists runs the risk of becoming a vicious circle very quickly. If some of my mates in the local party stop turning up for campaign sessions, then I have less of an incentive to turn up too.

This is still very early in the project and these early impressions need to be strengthened or modified in the light of further interviews. Anyone who is interested in knowing more about the project or would like to comment on any of the above are invited to contact me on r.pettitt@kingston.ac.uk.