Reconstructing Conservative party membership in World War II Britain

Abstract

The reconstruction of past trends in party membership can be fraught, especially when parties themselves kept no aggregate records. This was the case with the British Conservative party prior to 1946. The aggregate figures never existed, and the data that would be required to construct no longer exist to the required extent. Nonetheless, this article argues that it is methodologically possible to offer more detailed analysis than hitherto, by analysing local as well as national-level Conservative sources, triangulating with the national-level Labour party statistics and taking insights from more explicitly political science literature. This paper's substantive argument is that although Conservative membership fell after 1939, it did not collapse; that it recovered somewhat from early 1943 onwards and that recovery then afforded the party a base from which it was able to build, with spectacular success after 1945.