By far the most common form of recruitment to undertake political acts, as shown in Panel A of Figure 1 (above, using weighted data), is via generic means such mass emails, letters, or social media requests.[1] It is only generic requests and requests from friends (Panel C) that are received by a majority of people with any frequency, though the latter has a far greater percentage (46.0%) than the former (28.8%) who never receive such requests. The remaining forms of recruitment see between three fifths (58.8%, requests from voluntary organisation members (Panel G)) and four fifths (82.1%, religious organisation members (Panel F)) of people indicating that they are never recruited to political acts via those routes. Thus, it seems that in pre-Brexit Britain, the single most common source of invocations to undertake political activity was not personal connections but generic requests, albeit ones that may have been targeted by the organisations sending them.
As with both official positions held and political acts undertaken, we can summarise political recruitment by counting how many types of request people ever receive. The result of doing this is presented, using weighted data, in Figure 2, and we can see that a plurality of people (albeit only a fifth, or 19.8%) never received any requests. A majority (56.1%) of respondents receive three or fewer forms of request though, of course, that means that a sizeable minority (43.9%) of people receive between four and eight forms of recruitment request with some frequency. This indicates that recruitment to undertake political may have been quite widespread in pre-Brexit Britain. However, we should interpret the figures relating to recruitment requests with caution. This is because such recruitment is correlated with political activity and, as noted elsewhere, surveys (especially drawn from panels of volunteer respondents) tend to over-sample politically active people.
| Variable names | sc_polactrecruit_ir, sc_par_generic_ir, sc_par_family_ir, sc_par_friend_ir, sc_par_neighbour_ir, sc_par_colleague_ir, sc_par_membrelorg_ir, sc_par_membvolorg, sc_par_campaigner_ir |
| Number of cases | 1,405 |
| Number of categories | 5 |
| Categories to code as missing | None |
| Cases to code as missing | None |
| Recoded variable name | sc_par_count |
| Number of cases | 1,405 |
| Number of categories | 9 |
| New and old categories | Categories 1 (‘Once a year or less’), 2 (‘2-3 a year’), 3 (‘4+ times a year’), 4 (‘Monthly+’) on each of the original variables were counted as 1 (i.e. indicating that the form of recruitment has been received at some point), with category 0 (‘Never’) counted as zero. As such, 0 on the new variable indicates that no forms of recruitment have ever been received whilst 8 indicates that all 8 forms of recruitment have been received with some frequency. |
[1] The weighted and unweighted numbers behind Figure 1 can be found in Table A1. Note: The question about requests recruitment by colleagues was only shown to respondents who were in part-time or full-time work, with respondents who were not in work (n = 578) coded as never receiving recruitment requests from colleagues.
Privilege and Participation 