For the birds

BRITAIN’S government supports programmes that promote democracy in 13 countries around the world, home to 300m voters. It is safe to assume that none of them is told an embarrassing truth about the way democracy works at home: between them the three main parties now have fewer members than the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. David Cameron may feel pretty good about himself when he strides onto the stage in Birmingham, where the Tories will soon hold their annual conference. But in his soul he knows that Britain cares more about the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker than about the Conservative Party.

Party politics in Britain is a meagre affair, particularly when compared with the baroque goings-on across the Atlantic. The 2010 general election, the equivalent of presidential and congressional races rolled into one, was fought for a total of £32m ($42m), which is about what Barack Obama and John McCain spent on television advertising alone in Florida in 2008. This November’s election will make that outlay seem modest.

To meet their puny expenditure, Britain’s parties are engaged in a constant scrabble for cash. With revenues from subscriptions falling, the Conservatives exchanged donations for knighthoods in the 1980s and 1990s. Labour continued the practice when it took over, throwing in membership of the House of Lords. The resulting scandals put off well-meaning donors who did not like the insinuations that stuck to anyone who gave money to politicians, leaving the parties too reliant on a small group of businessmen whose enthusiasm for politics was matched by their fondness for the tax codes of Monaco and Belize. The result, which becomes clearer each party-conference season, is that a huge amount of power lies in the hands of organisations that are perennially broke and unpopular.

The blame should not fall entirely on the parties: bigger forces are at work. In the 1950s, when the Conservatives had nearly 3m members (17 times their current number), people joined for all sorts of reasons, including to find a spouse. This turned out to be a successful political strategy—it gave the party Margaret Roberts who, after marriage to a fellow member, Denis Thatcher, became its most successful post-war leader. Nowadays a research chemist looking for love has other options: eHarmony and Match.com will even sort potential dates for their political views. Labour’s ranks were swollen by a rule that a constituency party needed 1,000 members to be affiliated with the central party. Some constituencies gave party cards away to make up numbers.

Slumping party membership in the decades since is yoked to a decline in voting along class lines—an unambiguously good thing. And the phenomenon is not limited to Britain. The only two countries in western Europe to have increased the number of party members in the past 30 years are Greece and Spain. Both had the advantage, if you can call it that, of a bout of dictatorship before 1980, and so started from a low base. Everywhere else, non-joiners have been in the ascendant.

A further headwind is that politics is rather consensual. Peter Kellner of YouGov, a pollster, points out that when polled on values issues such as attitudes to bankers or to gay marriage, Conservative voters may split 60:40 and Labour voters 40:60. That leaves a huge overlap, particularly when compared with the answers American voters give pollsters to similar questions. And party strategists have the same data about the centrist voters who can win them elections and tailor their policies and messages accordingly, all the while pretending to be far more different than they actually are. The best line from the Lib Dem conference this week came from Vince Cable, the business secretary, who characterised Labour’s position on the economy thus: “Workers of the world unite. We need a Plan B. We should not cut the deficit in six years but seven.” It is hard to sell tickets to arguments like this. On the other hand, consensus means that Britain’s politicians can be relied on to turn back before they get anywhere near a fiscal cliff.

Listen to the tweeting

Were they companies, the failure to replace revenue from a dwindling number of paying customers would make parties candidates for takeover or bankruptcy. But parties are not businesses. Rather like newspapers, their importance has not declined in proportion with their subscribers. Instead, they are becoming something new—and just as important as they were when membership rolls were counted in millions.

Parties have strong brands which make elections more orderly. They allow voters to change the government, something that would be hard in a system made up of independents. They are labour-saving devices, framing debates and bundling the answers to a series of complicated questions into a simple choice at election time. Because nothing else has emerged to do these jobs, predictions of their demise are likely to be wrong.

And parties will evolve as their active membership dwindles, allowing them to do more with less and perhaps even become less dependent on those awkward donors. At the last general election, three-quarters of campaigns used volunteers who were not party members. One way to hasten this change would be to run open primaries in parts of the country where parties’ constituency organisations have withered. California, which sets trends in politics as in other things, recently adopted this system. The public, which hates the idea of paying for parties, might chip in.

Open primaries would allow candidates to attract bands of new supporters. In exchange, parties will have to make fewer demands on these new recruits. One reason why birds are popular is that they do not expect humans to pay money to spend a week listening to long speeches in conference centres. Parties might think about that while they are in season.

^{Economist.com/blogs/bagehot}