Dr. Tim Bale is currently funded by the Leverhulme Foundation to work on a volume on the contemporary British Conservative Party. This will be published by Oxford University Press, and explores the party?s ideological and organisational adaptation since the war. Based on interviews with past and present party elites, and on a reading of both primary and secondary written and broadcast sources, the book asks what is the nature, sequence and extent of the endogenous developments and exogenous shocks that cause a party to change - and what are the relationships between them?

Gender and the Conservative Party

Professor Paul Webb and Dr. Sarah Childs have been awarded £475,000 to by the ESRC to research Gender and the Conservative Party (project grant RES-062-23-0647). Dr. Sally Marthaler, based in the Sussex European Institute, is Research Officer to the project.

This three-year project (which started in October 2007) provides for a comprehensive gendered analysis of the contemporary Conservative Party in order to assess the extent to which it is incorporating women and their concerns into the party. Drawing on mainstream political science accounts of parties and party systems, comparative party literature on centre-right parties and feminist accounts of women's political representation, the research examines the recruitment of women in the party and identifies the attitudes, roles and influences of women and men within the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary party. It also explores changes in policy on 'women's issues' since 1990, how the party acts on women's legislation as it passes through Parliament, and considers policy developments under David Cameron's leadership. Further, it explores whether the party's efforts to increase the number of Conservative women MPs, along with its policies on women's issues, will be favourably received by voters. The research uses a range of methods: a postal survey; in-depth interviews; analysis of parliamentary behaviour; focus groups with voters; analysis of party manifestos and policy documents; as well as secondary analysis of existing data sets, including the British Representation Studies and the British Election Studies. Resulting data will be subject to both qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Further information on this project, including research papers and data emerging from this project are available here.