In The Liberal Democrats, David Cutts, Andrew Russell, and Joshua Townsley surveys the party’s fluctuating fortunes and identity struggles within Britain’s turbulent political landscape. According to James Dennison, the book’s thorough history and informed practicality make for a nuanced understanding of the party’s identity crisis and potential future trajectory.

The Liberal Democrats: From hope to despair to where? David Cutts, Andrew Russell, and Joshua Townsley. Manchester University Press. 2023.

The Liberal Democrats represents a robust, thoughtful and innovative account of a party that was part cause and part victim of Britain’s last 14 years of political volatility and woeful governance. As the full title suggests, the book’s approach is to explain over-time variation in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats with which we might predict the party’s future outcomes. In doing so, it takes a – for contemporary political science standards – long view of the party’s trajectory, with the eponymous “hope” referring to what now seems like a different political age. The authors’ strengths shine through on several fronts throughout the book. Notably, they show deep understanding of the history of the party, divisions and debates within liberal political thought, the use of quantitative methods and a broad range of data sources to make their point and, most innovatively, a highly practical approach to conveying themes, conclusions, and recommendations that party insiders would themselves find useful.

The book does a good job of conveying the precarious, perilous and unpredictable context of a third party in a majoritarian system that ‘Since their foundation in 1988 … have faced a political identity crisis’.

The book does a good job of conveying the precarious, perilous and unpredictable context of a third party in a majoritarian system that “Since their foundation in 1988 … have faced a political identity crisis” (1). Interesting sections include those on how other parties came to copy the Liberal Democrats’ highly effective electoral strategies of the early 2000s (“diminishing campaign advantage”, 58) while the list of blunders that explain the transition to “despair” are comprehensively documented. The former constitutes a part of one of several “themes” that the book presents – common theoretical factors skilfully applied to this case that few political scientists would take umbrage with. These roughly include: credibility, identity and social ties, party structure and agency, retrospective evaluations, campaigning, and the political opportunity structure including the broader party system.

The results of the 2024 General Election – at which the party returned its most MPs ever (72) on a less than spectacular vote share (12.2 per cent) – do little to undermine this theoretical approach, as the party this time benefitted from the shifting political opportunity structure and retrospective evaluations (albeit negative ones towards a different party). Similarly, the authors pinpoint “the credibility gap” as the biggest hurdle to Liberal Democrats success, something they were gifted on a silver plate as the outcome of Conservative governance became increasingly impossible for voters to ignore. Whether the party’s distinctive campaigning – more Wacky Races than any appeal to the likes of Gladstonian or Hobhousian thought, as brought up throughout this book – made a difference is unclear. However, it did represent a return to what the authors pinpoint as the crucial ability of the Liberal Democrats to employ innovative campaigning methods often, indeed, at the expense of a political identity. The authors expected such, stating confidently that “(d)espite recent failings (some self-inflicted), we provide conclusive evidence that campaign intensity is on the up” (145).

Some readers might be forgiven for bemoaning a lack of the smears, slights and insinuations usually found in books on political parties.

Some readers might be forgiven for bemoaning a lack of the smears, slights and insinuations usually found in books on political parties. Indeed, anonymous interviews with party insiders would have brought grist-to-the-mill if not relief to the many quantitative analyses that power the narrative forward. The essentially historical nature of the book – an over-time analysis of a single case – may jar slightly with its strictly political scientific methods to some, perhaps a small price to pay for the definiteness of the authors’ conclusions, however.

Assumptions could be dug into and given greater focus and dynamism if framed as the puzzles that they seemed to be to this reader. For example, should not the party’s – relatively constant – policies on Europe, the environment, electoral reform and the nature and role of the market chime with Britain’s socio-demographic and attitudinal trends over the last 50 years that these authors and others have highlighted? So why is the party left without a distinctive identity? Zooming out, why don’t liberal parties do better everywhere, not just in Britain? The book uses various devices to tie together the narrative, some of which are more convincing than others. For example, distinctions between short-term tactics “to reach the top table of British politics” and longer-term strategies to deal with “underlying issues” were left feeling like a slightly dubious dichotomy.

One gets the impression from the book that the Liberal Democrats is currently less a vehicle of ideology or social change and more an artefact of Britain’s electoral system.

The overall picture of the party that the authors convey is nuanced and fair throughout, however. Most damningly, one gets the impression from the book that the Liberal Democrats is currently less a vehicle of ideology or social change and more an artefact of Britain’s electoral system. Indeed, the authors conclude with several reasonable goals – deduced from their empirical findings – for the party: “re-empowering the local”, “a socially liberal party”, “future proofing the party”, and “the Liberal Democrats as a movement?” each of which would put the party on firmer ground. Future work – either academic or party political – will want to build on these, perhaps with greater reference and comparison to other parties and the policies of Liberal parties elsewhere.

The book joins several monographs in recent years of single British parties – Conservative, Labour, UKIP, the Greens, the DUP and the SNP – that in most cases take similar methodological approaches. However, The Liberal Democrats goes one step further in terms of its practical and clear recommendations.

Overall, The Liberal Democrats will deservingly be the go-to study for those seeking to understand Britain’s “third party” for many years to come, and in several ways itself pushes the study of parties forward. The book joins several monographs in recent years of single British parties – Conservative, Labour, UKIP, the Greens, the DUP and the SNP – that in most cases take similar methodological approaches. However, The Liberal Democrats goes one step further in terms of its practical and clear recommendations. Its conclusions are largely borne out by the subsequent 2024 general election, redeeming the authors’ balanced, detached, and at times painstaking approach. The account does lack comparative considerations, qualitative evidence and some theoretical puzzles to be solved, all of which would give the authors’ work greater perspective, generalisability, and vim. Instead, we see the party through a mid-range lens, which probably best allows the authors to answer their book’s eponymous question of “to where?” Their answer: to short-term fluctuations as “change agents rather than electoral victors” (272). After 2024 – with a bolstered parliamentary party, political class all out of ideas, yet a probable period of one-party political stability – liberals and Britons everywhere might reasonably hope so.