The political background, ideas and attitudes of Liberal and Labor party activists in some Sydney electorates

This is a detailed study of groups of activists from the two major political parties — the Liberal Party and the Australian Labor Party. Apart from an intrinsic interest in the activists themselves, one major assumption was that focussing on party activists provided an important perspective from which to view a political party. There are, of course, obvious similarities between the major parties in the Australian context. Both are mass parties with a branch form of organisation geared to operating within a parliamentary system. They are the two major parties in a basically two—sided system and to that extent both are characterised by their attempts to widen their electoral appeal, to aggregate the interests of various groups and to pursue certain pragmatic adjustments to perceived electoral necessity. However, here, a major focus will be on apparent differences between the two groups of activists. At the lowest levels of mass, branch—type political parties many members are nominal and transient. This study is concerned with more active members who might be expected to have a somewhat longer term interest in their political party. Within each party, branch members elect delegates to represent them on bodies which are organised at the level of the various federal or state electorates. It was decided here to concentrate on those delegates elected to the federal body (Federal Electorate Council, F.E.C., in the Labor Party and-Federal Conference in the liberal Party) rather than to the state counterpart. This enables the study to cover a wider geographic area and, significantly, the breakdown of census data which was available for federal electoral divisions provided useful comparative data