Parties and Their Members
Organizing for Victory in Britain and Germany
Published on 21. March 1996
Book
Hardback
290 pages
978-0-19-827918-1 (ISBN)
Description
Why would parties continue to care about membership enrollment in an age of television campaigning and direct-mail fundraising? To answer this question, Parties and their Members traces organizing strategies employed by British and German membership parties during the past half century. Using careful analysis of historical records and interviews with party officials, the author shows that party organizers have reacted to technological and social developments by modifying their ideas about how members can help parties achieve their goals.
Reviews / Votes
It tells an important and interesting story of the changing balance between party organizations and their members in a comparative context. That alone makes this book a very useful contribution to recent research on party members and the complex calculations surrounding their roles as both assets and liabilities. * EPOP Newsletter * This is a persuasively argued, conceptually sophisticated and interesting book ... it is also surprisingly digestible. * Parliamentary Affairs * Scarrow's rigid structure is necessary for the sake of convincing political scientists, and political scientists, as Scarrow - barely concealing a smile - suggests, increasingly play an important part in the thinking of party leaders. But this does not stop the book appealing at a wider level ... The material also escapes its argumentative confines by dint of the glory of its detail, and descriptions of the idiosyncracies of envelope-licking and fund-raising, derived from Scarrow's personal research, are not only helpful but delightful. The book also makes contributions at a far wider and more popular level than Scarrow intends. * Contemporary British History * This is a persuasively argued, conceptually sophisticated and interesting book. Despite the theoretical apparatus which seems to be obligatory in comparative politics, it is also surprisingly digestible. * David Denver, German Politics, Vol. 6, No. 1, April '97 * Scarrow's work represents a valuable addition to this 'new wave' of party membership research ... Scarrow's analytical framework is relevant, and the study sticks closely to it. The perspective is electural and rationalistic ... Scarrow's book constitutes a very valuable contribution. It offers new insights into the inner lives of four major European parties, makes an important addition to our knowledge of party organizations and it shows that many assumptions about developments in political parties should not be taken at face value. * Anders Widfeldt, Journal of Party Politics, vol.3 no.4 *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Oxford University Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
line figures, tables
Dimensions
Height: 224 mm
Width: 146 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
491 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-827918-1 (9780198279181)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Susan E. Scarrow teaches political science at the University of Houston. She has been a visiting scholar at Nuffield College, Oxford, at Mannheim University, and at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University.