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‘The secret of leaving’: who quits their party and why? Grassroots members in the UKTim Bale (Queen Mary University of London)Monica Poletti (Queen Mary University of London)Paul Webb (University of Sussex)Research on party membership has focused on why party members join political parties, not on why they leave them. But people quit parties all the time, making it something we should seek to understand. This paper uses surveys of members of six UK parties – Labour, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the Greens and UKIP – to explore the role ideology and incentives play in the decision to leave or the (non) decision to stay. It finds that members’ sense of ideological proximity to their party, their evaluation of party leaders, the feeling that they play a valued role within the party, and their track record of active commitment to the party all play significant parts in explaining whether they remain with the party or decide to leave it. A more qualitative approach supports the idea that ideology and leadership matter, though so, too, do ‘events’ – most obviously, in this case, Brexit. This is interesting scientifically but might also be of practical value to parties – organizations which need to be concerned as much with retention as recruitment. * Paper prepared for ‘Brexit and Beyond: Implications for British and European Politics’ one-day short course at the 2018 APSA Annual Meeting, Boston, MA; Wednesday, 29 August 2018. NB Work in progress. Do not cite without authors’ permission.Political scientists interested in party membership have always, and not at all unreasonably, paid particular attention to the question of why people join parties in the first place. But their focus on joining has led us to ignore something which is arguably just as important, namely people leaving their parties. So much so, indeed, that, since the pioneering work of Whiteley and Seyd, which did briefly consider the issue of leaving (see Whiteley and Seyd, 2002: 149-168) there would appear to be only three papers – one published (Wagner, 2017), two unpublished (Kosiara-Pedersen, 2016 and Weber, 2017a) – ever written on the topic (at least in English: see Rohrbach, 2011, Kosiara-Pedersen, 2017: 295-311).This seems odd. People quitting clearly has a huge impact on parties, most obviously on those parties that are losing rather than gaining members over time. But it will also make a difference to parties which are, for the moment at least, bucking the trend and attracting people to their colours. Just because their net membership is growing doesn’t mean that no-one is leaving, only that, for the moment at least, more people are joining than departing. For instance, the surge in UK Labour Party membership since 2015 might have looked even more impressive had the party been able, not only to bring in hundreds of thousands of new members, but also managed to hang onto the tens of thousands who, according to media reports anyway, have left it in the meantime (Press Association, 2017). And even in cases where a party’s membership seems to be fairly stable, we know (see, for example, Voerman and van Schuur, 2011: 80) that there is an awful lot of turnover and churn below the surface. Our focus on joining rather than leaving may be more practical than intellectual. Put bluntly, one is much easier to study than the other. The most popular, although by no means the only (see Garland, 2016), way to understand party members is to survey them. More often than not, this means questioning people who have, either in the recent or dim distant past, joined a party; it would therefore appear to rule out those who have left it. In reality, of course, this is not quite true. First, it may be possible, for instance, to pull together samples of the population (for example, those collected for election studies) large enough to allow a number of ex- as well as current party members to be asked questions. Secondly, many current party members actually have experience of leaving a party – more often than not the party they now belong to once again. Like exit and voice (van Haute, 2015: 187), exit and loyalty aren’t always as mutually exclusive as they first seem: sometimes leaving results in a separation (maybe long, maybe short) rather than a divorce. Those members that that left a party before they re-joined it can then be asked about that, and they can also be compared, demographically and attitudinally, with those who maintained their membership through thick and thin (see Bale, Poletti and Webb, 2017).Still, this is obviously very far from any kind of gold-standard research design. For one thing, people who left and re-joined their party might only be in a small minority of current members (thereby making for a very small sample) and also untypical of those who leave a party and never go back. For another, some of those ‘re-joiners’ will have left their party a very, very long time ago, meaning that their recollection of why they did so may be prone to post hoc rationalization and also pretty hazy. And then there is the most obvious problem of all, namely that, whatever the sample size or quality, cross-sectional studies, while they allow us to capture and compare individual-level characteristics and attitudes, cannot track individual-level change, making convincing causal claims difficult if not impossible to make.Ideally, then, what we need is a panel study of people who were party members when first surveyed but who have since left (and not re-joined) and are willing to be surveyed again (van Haute, 2015: 196 and Wagner, 2017: 348). We also need to survey them not too long after they have left so that, leaving the question of post hoc rationalization aside for a moment, their reasons for leaving remain relatively fresh in their minds. Fortunately, and as far as we are aware for the very first time anywhere, we now have such a study.In the early summer of 2015, we surveyed the members of the biggest six parties in the UK – the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the Greens and UKIP. In the early summer of 2017, we went back to those people and surveyed them again, asking a range of particular questions to ex-members. We wanted to understand why those ex-members had left, both by finding out what they thought had motivated them and by looking back to our earlier surveys to see if there was anything about them that, in retrospect, might have allowed us to predict that they, and not others, would be the ones to leave. Our findings will, we hope, be of interest not only to scholars but also to the parties themselves. Like any voluntary organization (or indeed any business firm or public service), parties are presumably as interested in retention as they are in recruitment.What we think we already know about why people leave partiesThe apparent long-term decline of membership in Europe’s political parties, while by no means as universal and linear as some imagine (see K?lln, 2016) is both well documented (van Biezen et al., 2012, Scarrow et al., 2017) and in many ways persuasively explained (eg Whiteley, 2011; see also Mair, 2013, Scarrrow, 2014, and Tormey, 2015). As a result, political scientists think they have a pretty good idea as to why, overall, fewer people in the twenty-first century are keen to invest their time and money in belonging to a political party than was the case in the twentieth. Whether we are talking about people who did belong to parties but no longer do so, or (and the common assumption is that they account for most of the decline) people who never bother joining in the first place, representative politics no longer offers them what it once did, while whatever that was can now be found in a whole host of alternative activities and organizations, some of which simply weren’t around during the so-called golden age. Even then, however, we are for the most part talking about aggregates and broad structural and cultural changes rather than the myriad micro-decisions taken by individuals. As van Haute and Gauja note in their fascinating comparative volume (which argues that ‘divorce’ is part of what they call ‘the dynamics of membership involvement’ even if none of the contributions is able to deal with the issue), ‘looking at party membership decline alone does not say anything about who is staying and who is leaving’ (van Haute and Gauja (2015: 4, 199, 201) And, as Markus Wagner, author of one of the only three studies dedicated to the question admits, we still ‘know very little about what drives the decision to leave a political party, both theoretically and empirically’ (Wagner, 2017: 345).Wagner, although he arguably remains too intent on linking leaving to party decline, attempts to remedy this using an Austrian election study (Kritzinger et al., 2014) which, because party membership is still relatively high in that country, contains a fair few voters who are current (N=361) and former (N=187) party members. He then assumes (presumably for the sake of argument rather than because we have any evidence that this is, indeed, the case) that the reasons that someone might leave a political party are essentially the mirror image of why the literature on party membership (and the associated theory it leans on) says they might join one. Noting that their departure may be due to something that was true of them when they first joined (for instance, a characteristic that seems to distinguish members who stay rather than leave) or to something which changed after they joined, he therefore suggests (Wagner, 2017: 345, 350) that there are essentially five reasons for someone quitting, namely ‘civic resources’, ‘cognitive engagement’, ‘alternative participation’, ‘ideological preferences’, and ‘material benefits’; put another way, members leaveif they do not have the time, money or skills to engage in the party; if they are disengaged from and disillusioned with politics and parties; if they prefer to use alternative forms of political participation; if they do not have strong ideological views or do not feel represented by their political party; and if they do not gain material benefits from membership.Wagner finds that, when asked to pick from a range of options presented to them, the most frequent explanations given by ex-members for leaving included the following: ‘Ideological differences between me and the party’ (27%) and ‘Membership no longer [materially/instrumentally] useful to me’ (22%) – a reason which may or may not relate to Austria being a well-known case of clientelistic patritocracy – followed by ‘Too little time for the party’ (16%) and ‘Too little influence on the party line’ (13%), with ‘I am engaged in other voluntary work’ (9%), ‘Parties cannot change anything in society’ (8%) and ‘Membership too expensive’ (7%) bringing up the rear. But although Wagner also finds, rather encouragingly, that there appears to be a good fit between individuals’ reasons and their attitudes (eg leavers who picked ideological differences exhibited a greater distance from their parties on a 0–10 left-right scale than other former members), he moves on swiftly to look at the differences between former and current members.Wagner’s regressions reveal that the two groups do not seem to differ socially or demographically. However, although there are no significant differences between the two with regard to internal efficacy, political knowledge, political discussion and political cynicism, they do differ on items like political interest, external efficacy and civic duty: in short, ‘People who have left a political party have lower levels of political interest, are less likely to think that politicians care about what people like them think and are less worried about failing to turn out to vote’ (Wagner, 2017: 353), although whether they became like that while they were members or were already like that when they joined, he cannot, of course, tell. Meanwhile, in spite of it being cited as a reason for leaving by one in ten of those who left, getting involved in alternative forms of participation does not appear to make a member more likely to leave their party. Nor, interestingly, do material/instrumental benefits (but since these are measured purely by whether someone works in the public sector, albeit a relatively politicised one as we have noted above, this finding may not be particularly reliable). Ideology, however, appears to matter as much as respondents themselves think it does: the more strongly a member feels about it, the less likely they are to leave – unless they perceive a mismatch exists (or has developed) between themselves and their party.The idea that ideological distance opening up between a member and their party may trigger departure is supported by another cross-sectional study (Weber, 2017a; see also 2017b) – this time one of just over 4000 young members of the German Social Democrats (SDP), albeit one slightly limited, perhaps, by the fact that they were asked (in 2015) not about having left but about the likelihood that they might leave the party sometime in the next ten years. Some 15% of those surveyed thought they were likely or very likely to quit within a decade. Being more likely to think one might leave is associated with feeling that the party’s structures do not allow as much membership involvement and influence as one thinks they should; in contrast, holding some sort of office within those structures and being active in the party means one is less likely to think one might leave in the future (Weber, 2017: 23). At least among young members of the SDP, left-wingers are also both less likely to take up office and more likely to leave (Weber, 2o17: 27). It also looks as though, contrary perhaps to common wisdom, that the longer one has been in the party, the more likely one is to think one might leave – new joiners seem to want to give the party a chance, whereas old hands (or at least some of them) have had more time to realise that membership may not be for them (Weber, 2017: 25). All in all, Weber’s study points to the fact that, at least for young members in a supposedly progressive, left-of-centre organization, it is how much the party actually brings them into its decision making that makes the biggest difference; those who feel it fails to do so are more likely to see themselves quitting. Meanwhile, those who get active and take roles in the party are more likely to see themselves staying. The message, at least for parties that are nominally committed to internal democracy, is to live up to their promises and get their members involved.The same message comes from an impressively comprehensive study of party members in Denmark carried out by Karina Kosiara-Pedersen (2016). Like Wagner, she begins by suggesting we can explain leaving by seeing it as the mirror image of joining: in other words leaving is the product of what she calls ‘inverted enrolment incentives.’ Like Weber, she looks only at potential rather than actual exit, in her case by asking the yes/no question, ‘Have you considered leaving your party within the last year?’, which, although it elicited an average ‘yes’ response of 19%, actually exposed a good deal of variation in the nine parties involved in the study, with in one case an astounding 42% of members admitting they’d thought about leaving while in another it was only a paltry 6%. This variation aside, the Danish data seems to support many (though not all) of findings of the Austrian and German studies. For instance, demographics hardly matter if they matter at all, but nor (in Denmark anyway) does the desire to hold office. On the other hand, both dissatisfaction with intra-party democracy and ideological disagreement with one’s party appear to be just as important as motives for (possible) exit in Denmark as they seem to be elsewhere. Conversely, being active seems to discourage people from thinking about leaving, as does (interestingly) the extent to which members feel an emotional attachment to their party and whether they evaluate party activities as interesting and as a chance to mix with the kind of people they like.In addition to these three studies, we can turn to the work of two pioneers in the field of party membership. Whiteley and Seyd (2002) were primarily concerned with explaining declining activism among those who stuck with their party – in this case Labour, for which they were able to construct a panel study over the 1997-1999 period – but they were also curious as to whether their General Incentives Model (GIM) could also provide an explanation for why some members left it altogether. They found, broadly speaking, that it could. Although social class appeared to have some effect on exiting (with working-class members marginally more likely to leave than middle-class members), the effect was not strong – and certainly not as strong as disappointment with the party’s performance in government, which they also found to be significant (unlike, rather interestingly, dissatisfaction with its leaders). Getting involved appeared to be important as well, with inactive members more likely to leave than their active counterparts. Ideology seemed to matter: ‘with [Labour’s] left-wingers being more likely to exit the party than [its] right-wingers’, who, it should be said, were at that time clearly in control. But so, too, did (other) selective incentives, the weakening of which was associated with a greater likelihood of exit, and expressive incentives (measured by strength of partisanship) with ‘strongly attached members…much less likely to leave’, even when other factors might have pushed them into doing so.HypothesesOur review of the literature suggests that the most generalizable factors influencing the decision to leave political parties are ideology, leadership, attitudes towards intra-party processes, and being actively embedded in the local party network. Based on this, we set out to test the following simple hypotheses in this paper. IDEOLOGICAL FACTORSH1: The greater the perceived left-right distance between a member and his or her party, the greater the likelihood of exit.H2: The greater the change in left-right distance between member and his or her party, the greater the likelihood of exit.LEADERSHIP FACTORSH3: The greater the dissatisfaction with leader performance, the greater the likelihood of exit. INTRA-PARTY PROCESSESH4: The greater the dissatisfaction with intra-party processes, the greater the likelihood of exit. ACTIVISM WITHIN THE LOCAL PARTY NETWORK H5: The more actively committed members are to a local party network, the less likely they are to exit.In short and in summary, we expect membership dissatisfaction with a party’s ideological position, its leadership or its intra-party processes to increase the odds on exit, while active commitment to and embeddedness in the local party network should work in the opposite direction, as a constraint on exit.Data and methodA few weeks after the general election of 2015 we surveyed just over 5,500 members of six political parties. Then, in the weeks which followed the general election of 2017, we sent questionnaires to as many people as possible from our original surveys – but only after determining which of them were still members of political parties. To those who were no longer members, we sent a different questionnaire aimed at helping us to understand why they had left by (a) asking them directly about their decision to leave and (b) allowing us to compare them, demographically and attitudinally to those who had not. A previous paper (Bale, Poletti and Webb, 2017) included material from the leaver’s questionnaire. For the purposes of this paper, however, we will focus mainly on the answers given to the 2015 survey (and, when we calculate the increased or decreased left right distance from 2015 to 2017, the 2017 survey). That said, because it is almost certainly the case that what one British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, famously termed ‘events, dear boy, events’ have some impact on individual’s decision to leave – even if only as straws which break camels’ backs – we also include an analysis of responses given by former members when they were invited in the leavers questionnaire to expand upon their reasons for quitting.ResultsIn Table 1, we report the results of a binary logistic model which tests these hypotheses. There are 2088 respondents in our panel data – British party members whom we first interviewed immediately after the 2015 general election and then re-interviewed just over two years later in the aftermath of the 2017 election. Some 114 of these respondents had left their party during the intervening two years. H1 is evaluated by reference the subjective distance that members feel themselves to be from their party. The logistic regression coefficient is signed as expected in that the greater this distance is felt to be, the greater the odds on a respondent leaving their party between 2015 and 2017, although this is only significant at the 10% level. This, then, offers tentative confirmation of H1. More convincing is the evidence in favour of H2: the coefficient for the change in perceived left-right distance over the period is also positive, as expected, and significant at p<.01. The importance of feelings about the performance of party leaders during the election campaign (in 2015) is similarly confirmed: the lower the rating of a leader’s performance, the more likely a member is to have exited by the time of our survey after the 2017 election (p.<001). Thus, H3 also looks to be correct.Table 1: Binary Logistic Regression Model: Exiting Party Membership, 2015-2017BS.E.Sig.Exp(B)Subjective left-right distance from own party (0-10).170.100.0881.185Change in left-right subjective distance from party, 2015-2017 (0-10).210.081.0091.233How well did your leader perform in election, 2017 (0-10)?-.207.039.000.813To what extent, if at all, does the leadership respect members? (reference = not at all).017 A lot-1.349.625.031.259 A fair amount-1.713.617.005.180 Not very much-1.778.680.009.169How active have you been in the party over the past five years (0-10)?-.105.037.005.901Length of party membership-.060.012.000.942CONTROL VARIABLESGender (reference = women).329.225.1451.389Social Grade (reference = ABC1).271.218.2151.311Education (reference = graduates)-.152.210.468.859Constant.998.717.1642.712Dependent variable: 1=Left party between 2015 and 2017, 0=Remained a party member in 2017. N=2008. Source: UK Party Members Project Panel Survey 2015-2017.In order to gauge H4 about satisfaction with intra-party processes, we draw on a question about whether or not members feel that they are respected by the leadership. Admittedly, this is a slightly oblique way of coming at the issue, but we would argue that this question taps respondents’ feelings about whether they have a positive and valued role and purpose to play in the party: they would hardly feel this to be the case if the way that the party is run is regarded by them as deficient. The negative signs for this variable in the model indicate that respondents who feel that the leadership respects members ‘a lot’, ‘a fair amount’ and even ‘not very much’ are all significantly less likely to quit the party than those who feel that it does not respect members at all. This would seem to be consistent with H4, then; the more value they feel themselves to be, the less likely they are to leave.Finally, we test H5 – concerning the degree of embeddedness within the local party network - by reference to two variables; the first simply measures how long respondents have been members, while the second gauges how active they have been within the party. The first of these measures shows that the length of membership proves to be significant – the longer one is a party member, the harder it becomes to leave, it would seem. More importantly, perhaps, it isn’t just a matter of being a member with a track record of durability that counts – it is also a question of having actively participated in party activities. Our self-reported activism scale shows that, as expected, the more active respondents claim to have been within their local party over the course of the preceding five years, the less likely they are to exit the party (p<.01). Thus, H5 seems to hold true. Note that, importantly, none of the various demographic control variables we have included in the model prove to be significant.But what of ‘events’? Even if they are, in some cases anyway, the proximate rather than the underlying cause of someone leaving their party, they are surely nonetheless important or at the very least interesting? We already know from previous analysis of the post 2017 general election leaver’s questionnaire (and indeed other studies) that the most common reason for leaving volunteered by ex-members is disagreement with the ideological/policy direction their party seems to be taking (Bale, Poletti and Webb, 2017). Figures 1-4 explore what happens if we investigate this further by categorising the reasons given by former members when we invited them to expand on their answers in writing.It is immediately apparent that this qualitative analysis (which throws up all sorts of sometimes idiosyncratic reasons for leaving, subsumed under ‘other’) supports the idea that ideology and leadership do indeed matter, but often in combination with one or two very obvious ‘events’. Just over half of those who gave their reasons for leaving UKIP said they did so because Brexit meant the party had fulfilled its purpose and because their last action hero, Nigel Farage, had stepped down. Brexit doesn’t seem to have driven many Greens to leave; but Labour’s big swing to the left under Jeremy Corbyn clearly persuaded a lot of those who explained their reasoning to us that the grass was redder on the other side. For over a quarter of those who told us why they’d left Labour, however, Corbyn was a push- rather than a pull-factor, although for a third of them the party’s failure to fight Brexit was the final straw. Interestingly, fewer than one in five of those who explained their reasons for leaving the Conservatives blamed their party’s pursuit of a hard Brexit.Figure 1: Ex-UKIP members (n=154)Figure 2: Ex-Green members (n=152)Figure 3: Ex-Labour members (n=261)Figure 4: Ex-Conservative members (n=139)ConclusionTo summarize, this model offers compelling evidence to support the hypotheses we started out with: members’ sense of ideological proximity to their party, their evaluation of party leaders, the feeling that they play a valued role within the party, and their track record of active commitment to the party, all play significant parts in explaining whether they remain with the party or decide to leave it. That they do so does not, however mean, that more immediate factors should be discounted.We cannot, of course, guarantee that leavers will never re-join their parties – or, perhaps other parties: indeed, one of the surprises, perhaps, about the self-reported reasons for leaving given to us in the first (2015) survey is the extent to which people who are sufficiently politically motivated to join a particular party can later decide that they actually prefer one of its rivals – and, in the case of Green Party members after 2017, not always that much later either. Emphasising this, though, risks implying that leaving one’s party is a pretty trivial decision. This would be a mistake. If there is one thing that our research so far (see Bale, Poletti and Webb, 2017 for more detail) suggests it is that it is a decision people make primarily for political reasons rather than as a function of, say, personal animosities or as a reaction changes in circumstances or residence, even if the latter are sometimes bound to play a part. ‘Events’ matter but those that that matter most are political events, with Brexit and big changes in party leadership or direction the most obvious recent example. We have, we hope, taken some baby steps to understanding what is going on. Whether our findings can help parties persuade more of their members to stay remains to be seen.ReferencesBale, Tim, Poletti, Monica and Webb, Paul (2017) ‘The secret of leaving: who quits their party and why? 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Parties and Party Systems: Structure and Context (Vancouver: UBC Press), pp.184-201.van Haute, Emilie and Gauja, Anika (2015) Party Members and Activists (Abingdon: Routledge).Voerman, Gerrit and van Schuur, Wijbrandt (2011) ‘Dutch political parties and their members’, in Emilie van Haute (ed) Party Membership in Europe: Exploration into the Anthills of Party Politics (Brussels: ULB), 77-94.Wagner, Markus (2017) ‘Why do Party Members Leave?’ Parliamentary Affairs 70 (2), pp. 344-360.Weber, Regina (2017a) ‘Who goes up and who drops out? Investigating the future visions of young party members’, Paper prepared for GraPa 2017, * Feb 10-11th 2017.Weber, Regina (2017b) Young people in old politics. Motivation, experiences and future perspectives of young members in the professionalised party organisation. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Duisburg-Essen, available at , Paul (2011) ‘Is the party over? The decline of party activism and membership across the democratic world’, Party Politics, 17(1), pp.21-44. Whiteley, Paul and Seyd, Patrick (2002) High Intensity Participation: the Dynamics of Party Activism in Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). ................
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