Constituency Agents and British Party Politics

We began by reviewing the history of agency and by describing the two major parties' procedures for recruiting and training agents. Not surprisingly, the perceptions that agents have of their roles is not entirely congruent with official perceptions. Approximately 20 per cent of the agents of both parties felt that the performance of various representational functions was the most important part of their job although these tasks are not included in official job descriptions. Moreover, although a majority of the agents in each party believed that their most important job was to build and maintain constituency organizations capable of winning elections, the majority of their time was not spent on this task. Conservative agents seemingly spent a disproportionate amount of time doing routine office work, whereas over 40 per cent of the Labour agents spent much of their time trying to raise the funds that paid their salaries. Large numbers of agents in both parties agreed that raising money in their constituencies was a difficult and largely unrewarding task.