Quote:
Originally Posted by rjt
The sucess of the Liberal Party has been due to concentrating on building up bases of support in specfic areas, I understand Liverpool is a good hunting ground for them as well.
It seems to me smaller partys do better when they target areas.
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I strongly agree with that. The first past the post voting system is really tough on smaller parties. The only realistic way to break through is to concentrate your efforts on a small area for a prolonged period. In that area, you can then hope to match the resources of the big parties, win some council seats and with time build up a good local reputation for representing the community.
To be fair, the Liberals started with an advantage: instead of having to start from zero and build up, they are a small fragment descended from a large, well-established party. The old Liberal Party pre-1988 was a federation of lots of local Liberal Associations. When the Liberals merged with the SDP in 1988, the federation was dissolved, but three of the local Liberal Association refused to join the new party and carried on the old Liberal Party instead. The point is that in their own areas they were quite strong, had long-established councillors, activists, organisation, a reputation and so on. It gave them a good start. Breaking out into new areas is presumably pretty tough, though, except as in the Devon case when they get a group of councillors defecting.