Ruling the Informational Void?: Party Ideas and UK Democracy in an Age of SpAds/PAds

Contemporary events in British politics have left journalists and academics alike lamenting that British political parties seem to be “out of ideas”. Such sentiment reveals an intriguing paradox for those concerned with the role of party advisers: namely, that in an age in which UK parties have come to rely on large coteries of political advisers, the ideas that these advisers supposedly advance appear to be difficult to discern. This, in turn, raises questions about who these advisers are and what kind of expertise they bring to the parties that they serve. More importantly, it also calls into question what the influence of party advisers means for the ability of the British party system to produce and communicate the ideas necessary for meaningful representative democracy. To explore these questions, this paper leverages a unique dataset of the employment histories of the top-level advisers to both the Labour and Conservative Parties over the last decade to ‘map out’ the recruitment patterns of each party’s advisory network. From here, it deploys a series of network analytic techniques to identify trends in each of these networks. It finds that to a significant degree both parties recruit advisers from the ranks of what is termed non-party ideational professionals (communications consultants, think tankers, media professionals, and the third sector), a practice that deviates from the historical norm in which strategic and policy advice primarily emerged from internal party research departments. With this said, it also identifies important variation between the two parties, showing that the Conservatives tend to recruit more heavily from public relations and communications firms relative to Labour, which draws a far greater portion of its advisors from the civil service and the third sector. To this end, it identifies a communicative focus in the advisory networks of the Conservative Party and an issue-specific focus in that of the Labour Party. Having identified these trends, the paper then concludes with a discussion about the implications of these findings for the health of UK party democracy. Building from the literature on the importance of party ideas in representative democracy, it argues that the turn to non-party ideational professionals has undermined the ability for the UK party system to produce the political antagonism and meaningful opposition that animates representative democracy.