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Political parties are crucial to British democracy, providing the foundations for mobilising voters. Their constituency branches are key links between voters and Parliamentary candidates and their activities require two vital resources – people and money. Much has been written on the decline of party membership but far less on money. In this much-needed new book, Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie use the latest research and hitherto unpublished material to explore financial differences across the UK's three main parties in the four years leading up to the 2010 General Election. They look at how much local parties raise for election campaigns and find that the more money candidates spend then, the better their performance. Analyses of their annual accounts, however, show that many local parties are unable to raise all of the money that they are entitled to spend on such campaigns. This reveals an unhealthy picture of grassroots party organisation in which the capacity to engage effectively with many voters is concentrated in a relatively small number of constituencies and is likely to remain so. This timely and essential book will make a major contribution to the literature on British elections and parties, especially to continuing debates regarding party funding. It will make important reading for academics, students, politicians, civil servants and others interested in this topic

Analyses the effects of political homogeneity and heterogeneity in citizens' conversation networks on ideological position Other things being equal, membership of more politically homogenous conversation networks leads individuals into more extreme political evaluations Network homogeneity drives polarisation of political attitudes and creates larger perceived gulfs between individuals' own views and the views they ascribe to parties opposed by their conversation partners. Persuasion is a well-known consequence of political discussion between citizens: people bring their partisan and ideological views into line with those of their discussion partners. Less often considered is another aspect of this process: does persuasion in conversation networks increase the gap individuals perceive between their own views and those of groups or parties opposed by their discussion partners? Building on work which suggests that ideological homogeneity within networks leads to increased polarisation and drives individuals to relative political extremes, the article examines British voters' perceptions of parties whose views they do not share. The more internally homogeneous the partisan message coming from their main discussion partners, the more extreme individuals become in their views, and the greater the gulf they perceive between themselves and parties not supported by their networks. But the effect is evident only on issues which are politically salient, suggesting this is a real conversation effect.

First-past-the-post electoral rules create strong incentives for parties to focus their campaigns on key marginal seats and much research has been devoted to the vote-winning potential of such activity. Less attention has been given to local party organisations' ability to mount these campaigns, however. We therefore examine recent evidence of British political parties' local campaigning capacities. Overall, Britain's grassroots party organisations are struggling. While some local parties are resource-rich, many are not: only half of all Conservative and fewer than one in six Labour and Liberal Democrat constituency parties had an annual turnover in 2010 exceeding £25,000. Many local parties are seriously under-resourced: funds are limited, donations meagre, and members few. For most local parties, campaign resources depend primarily on their own local fund-raising initiatives – but their yields tend to be low. Even in key marginal constituencies, many local parties increasingly struggle to resource their campaign activities. What is more, there are substantial variations between the various political parties in the relative health of their constituency operations, and in the national parties' abilities to subsidise local activities in strategically important seats. The implications for local voter mobilisation efforts in the UK are not good.