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roles of those external advisers who were employed by political parties so that one is
able to identify changes in roles and duties? This becomes a more acute issue in respect
of assessing degrees of professionalisation: how does one determine whether practices
in one era are more or less professional than practices in another era? In looking at a
long period of change, such issues reoccur and force us to question our interpretations
of change within political parties and in the way they interface with the electorate.

Part One of this chapter will provide a number of examples from the recent past that
illustrate some of the ways in which political parties have used experts and
professionals. Whether these changes lead to a more professional party is discussed in
Part Two. As well as offering a summary and conclusion, Part Three will explore the
theme of professionalisation in the context of governmental activities and political
actors,more generally.

ACCOUNTING FOR CHANGE IN BRITAIN – LESSONS FROM HISTORY
Studies of the history of British political parties often emphasise the ways in which they
have changed in response to external events such as the enlargement of the franchise,
the emergence of a mass electorate, and even controls on corrupt practices. As Bob Self
has argued:

…as a direct consequence (of an enlarged franchise from about 2.5 million in 1868 to
7.9 million in 1891), parties were obliged to devise cheaper and more effective
means of wooing, winning and mobilising voters through new organisational
structures and novel forms of propaganda and appeal … existing organisations were
transformed from cadre parties into something akin to mass membership bodies
(2000,p.21).
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
These transformations and the development of more ‘powerful centralised and
centralising party bureaucracies, to control and direct the party in the country’ (Self,
2000, p. 21) were often uneven: much depended – then, as now – on who was in charge
of the party and on the relationship between the main political party actors (leaders,
party chairmen, etc.). An equally important point to note in the context of
developments in party organisation is that organisational change often was – and
continues to be – a response to either electoral defeats or the prospect of defeat. Such
life-transforming events are usually seen as good grounds for change and for
reasserting control over the environment that political parties inhabit by creating
better and more efficient organisational structures, collecting better intelligence, and
making better use of both.

We can get a glimpse of these forces at play in the histories of both the Conservative
and Labour Parties in the immediate post-1945 period. What these examples show is
not only the increasing attention paid to issues of organisation per se but also the use of
experts and professionals within political parties in the pursuit of electoral success.
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