Paul Webb
Professor of Politics
political party members, party organisations, electrol behaviour, public opinion

Research

Paul Webb's research interests lie in the field of representative democracy, with a particular focus on British and comparative party politics, and electoral processes. His main ongoing or recent research activities include the Political Party Database Project, a major project on political party organizations with Susan Scarrow of the University of Houston and Thomas Poguntke of the University of Duessledorf (http://www.politicalpartydb.com/), which has generated the edited volume Organizing Political Parties. This was co-funded by the national funding agencies of the UK, USA and Germany to the total tune of £450,000.  He has also been heavily engaged in codirecting the ESRC with Tim Bale of Queen Mary University London on the politics of party membership in the UK; this was funded by a grant awarded by the ESRC, to a total value of £700,000. This has generated multiple journal articles, media contributions and the book (Routledge, 2019).

Previous major projects include  for which Sarah Childs (then of the University of Bristol) and Paul Webb were awarded £476,000 by the Economic & Social Research Council. The project made use of qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the position of women in the contemporary Conservative Party, the party's evolving policies towards women in society, and the impact of these policies on party competition. The project was completed in 2010 and led to the publication of Sex, Gender and the Conservative Party: From Iron Lady to Kitten Heels (Palgrave Macmillan 2011), along with numerous journal articles, conference papers and sundry commentaries for the media and blogs.

From 2009-2011, he worked on Representative Politics & Democratic Disconnect, a research project on citizen attitudes to political participation. This research was funded through a £40,000 Leverhulme Research Fellowship award and a smaller British Academy grant. Data was gathered through IPSOS-Mori focus groups and a specially commissioned YouGov survey of adults. This generated various conference papers and presentations, and an article for the European Journal of Political Research.

Paul is also engaged on writing a second edition of The Modern British Party System, which will be published by Oxford University Press.

He is Editor of the international journal Party Politics ().