2015年经济学人 活动组织者 政治中的阿拉丁神灯（在线收听）

Campaign organizers

The political genie

New and mysterious, the campaign organiser is credited with mighty powers

ROBIN MCGHEE's desk is a library of transatlantic electoral wisdom.

“The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory”, reads one title.

“Respect, Empower, Include”, urges another, a manual for Democratic Party activists in Colorado.

Mr McGhee's choice of literature is apt: although he works for the Liberal Democrats in Bristol,

his job as a professional campaigner is an American import.

Organisers are fairly new to Britain: parties have generally concentrated their paid staff in London,

leaving the ground war to candidates and volunteers.

But that is changing. The three main parties were all deeply impressed by Mr Obama's presidential machines in 2008 and 2012,

which used professional campaigners to cultivate a decentralised army of self-starting local volunteers.

All three now have organisers in their target constituencies and in some seats they already hold.

Party bosses talk about these hires, who tend to be recent graduates, in reverential tones.

“Ah,” they chide sceptical journalists, “but you haven't considered our organisers.”

The life of these political operators has its hardships.

They receive only basic training before being dispatched to the sticks.

On arriving in constituencies, often with little local knowledge,

a new organiser must be part management consultant, part social worker, fixing problems and soothing activists' egos.

The hours can be long. Some work from rented bedrooms, coffee shops or, in one case, the clinic of a Labour-supporting psychiatrist.

Most endure it all out of party loyalty and personal ambition, seeing organising as the springboard to a political career.

For their employers the advantages are more immediate.

Prospective MPs increasingly enjoy high-flying jobs (often elsewhere in politics) before running for office,

so may have less time to run their own campaigns.

Local party machines even in crucial marginal seats can be doddery,

disorganised and dominated by the few truculent oddballs inclined to turn up to meetings.

Organisers can purportedly inject a dose of youthful dynamism into such outfits.

They report to national headquarters, so faithfully enact party strategies.

They must also hit monthly canvassing targets. The Labour Party circulates rankings comparing organisers' results.

Paddy Ashdown, a pugnacious grandee, polices the performance of their Lib Dem counterparts.

Organisers also contribute computer know-how. Some elderly local activists are not comfortable using the snazzy voter databases purchased at great expense by party headquarters.

Hiring people like Mr McGhee ensures that the new technology does not go to waste.

In his Bristol office, he scrolls through voter categories, selecting “Labour-leaning”,

“pensioners” and “Bishopston ward” and generating a list that can be beamed, via an app, to canvassers' mobile phones.

Besides persuading existing party members to get their act together, organisers are supposed to recruit new ones.

Following the Obama playbook, that means asking members to invite friends,

relatives and co-workers to meetings on local issues like bus services and child care.

“A bit like a pyramid scheme,” says one British party strategist, only half-joking.

Churches, mosques, neighbourhood watch schemes and trade unions also provide routes to prospective supporters.

Partly for this reason (but mostly in response to a vote-rigging scandal in a candidate selection last year)

on March 1st Labour reformed its long-standing relationship with the unions to give local parties and organisers direct access to individual union members.

But the new methods may not be all they are cracked up to be.

America's earnest, decentralised political culture does not always appeal to starchy Britons.

In the last two presidential elections, Mr Obama's supporters held hundreds of house parties at which they implored their friends to support the campaign.

In his ill-fated bid for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2010,

David Miliband attempted to import this practice to Britain. Few supporters took up the invitation, which was widely mocked.

And though campaign organisers are meant to revive local political volunteering, they might have the opposite effect.

The arrival of one of these miracle-workers in a constituency risks giving harried candidates and disengaged activists the perfect opportunity to dump boring grunt work like canvassing and envelope-stuffing on the new recruit.

If they do, organisers could end up speeding the professionalisation of politics, which they were supposed to be reversing.