One of the early signs of the outstanding quality of this book is how the authors Paul Webb and Tim Bale subvert and transcend the title of their own book during its first chapter twice over. First, they introduce not “the party system” but the multitude of party systems that developed since devolution in the late 1990s. Second, they move beyond talking about party systems in Britain and instead consider the entire United Kingdom, thus including Northern Ireland, which too often remains ignored in scholarly debates about UK party politics. Admittedly, the discussion on Northern Ireland is limited (pp. 28–37), largely because, except for the Conservatives’ “confidence and supply” deal with the DUP under Theresa May (2017–19), its altogether idiosyncratic party system is too much of an outlier to warrant much consideration in the wider field of UK-wide party politics.
In essence, this is a book about change, not just change in the British party system but also change in party politics more widely over recent decades. It looks at erosion of the traditional two party-system, the rise of new parties, and the changing electoral geography across the United Kingdom. It also covers the changing relationship between society and parties through processes of realignment and dealignment and the changing nature of party competition. It includes detailed treatments of the modernization of party machines and party communication, the decline in party membership, the increase in party funding and spending, and the remaining capacity of parties to fulfill their political functions in an age of discontent and dissatisfaction with party politics.
This is a second edition of a book by Paul Webb from 2000, adding Tim Bale, who previously coauthored a multitude of articles about party politics with Webb and is a renowned expert on comparative party politics who has written extensively on both the major British parties. It is a highly warranted second edition, given the considerable change in British party politics over the past two decades, first, through the processes of devolution in Scotland and Wales, and second, during the previous decade through the contentious and cross-cutting issue of Brexit—which does not take center stage but makes crucial appearances in every chapter of the book.
The first three chapters trace and explain changes in the party system and paint a picture of periodic realignments, most recently through Brexit; these changes were driven largely by the adaptive strategies of parties to the replacement of social cleavages and a more systematic gradual process of dealignment, an unmooring of the electorate from its erstwhile party loyalties. The latter is argued to have less to do with cognitive mobilization (pp. 90–95) or class secularization (i.e., “the process by which social classes are said to have lost their physical, ideological and cultural cohesion,” p. 95), and perhaps more with party strategies. Labour’s repeated shifting of its ideological position to the center has “released” traditional supporters from their loyalties and moved them into the pool of swing voters over whom parties now compete freely: “whenever the party has de-emphasized its appeal to the working class, this appears to have stimulated a degree of class and partisan dealignment” (p. 100).
The next three chapters show how parties compete in this changing electoral environment, focusing on their general ideological approach, their adaptive movements in the policy space to attract voters, and their embrace of modern communication and marketing approaches. Again, the parties are presented as agents rather than victims of (or mere response mechanisms to) change. Hence, although British party politics (mainly Labour vs. Conservatives) of the past 50 years or so does predominantly follow expected Downsian patterns of centripetal competition, the most recent decade especially has shown that under certain circumstances—Labour under Corbyn and Conservatives under Johnson—parties can deviate from this and manage to take considerable numbers of voters with them, however temporarily.
The next part of the book focuses on the changing patterns of internal party politics (chaps. 7– 9). Although emphasizing some patterns of decline in party discipline and party membership, the authors reject the notion of “parties in decline” and argue that it is, just as within the electoral arena, rather a matter of parties having to adapt to changing circumstances. And they provide plenty of evidence of the past few decades being a period of professionalization and of the enhanced capacity of modern British parties in terms of campaign coordination and especially considerable growth in funding, despite Britain remaining the country that provides the least access of parties to public funding.
The final chapter assesses the extent to which Britain’s political parties continue to fulfill their core political functions: governance, representation, communication, and participation. Just as with the rest of the book, the conclusion is a quite confident rejection of any notion of “parties in decline.” Parties remain the dominant political actors in Britain, despite multiple challenges. But the authors do acknowledge that the dominant role of the two main players, Conservatives and Labour, tends to be embellished by an electoral and parliamentary system that has resisted much-needed essential reform.
This is a “big picture” kind of book. It not only contains plenty of empirical analysis, making great use of varied sources of data—including British Election Study survey data, Party Members Project Data, and Comparative Manifesto Project data—but also extensively reviews and appraises cutting-edge empirical research in the various relevant fields. In addition to being a major contribution to the field of British and comparative party politics research, perhaps the biggest service this book will do is providing students of British and comparative party politics with a fantastic overview of theories and empirical research. All the chapters include excellent introductions to major theories in the field—conceptualizing party systems, party competition, voting behavior, internal party politics, party finance, political trust, and so on. It also gives the reader excellent short but comprehensive overviews of British political history, most notably in the chapter about party ideologies (pp. 105–31).
If I am allowed some nit-picking, there are some small errors (and this is probably unavoidable with a book aiming to be this comprehensive). Being based in Scotland and knowing a little bit about Scottish politics, maybe I was bound to be regionally biased in which ones I picked up. Scotland does not use Westminster constituencies for the SMP districts in its mixed-member system: obviously it does not, because Holyrood elections have 73 constituencies compared with 59 Westminster constituencies (p. 19). Scotland also does not use multimember plurality voting but STV for its local elections (p. 38). Finally, the small number of valid responses to questions in the British Election Study about left–right positions of the SNP and Plaid Cymru do not indicate that voters do not know “much about the ideological positions of parties, especially minor parties” (p. 161). They are simply a reflection of the size of Scottish and Welsh subsamples in the BES, because only they were asked about these parties.
Those minor quibbles aside, this book is a tour de force through British party politics and should be read by anyone with an academic or general interest in the subject matter. It also manages to remain eminently readable for the non-expert even where it discusses complex theories or regression models employed to produce empirical findings.
