Grassroots Liberals

Royce Koop is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba.

David Stewart, University of Calgary:
Too often the study of politics is remote from the experiences of those who are engaged in it. Grassroots Liberals is an important corrective to this tendency and Koop is to be commended for taking the activities and insights of those who make their parties work at the local level seriously.

Munroe Eagles, co-author of Politics is Local: National Politics at the Grassroots:
An interesting and unusual treatment of Canada’s natural governing party. Koop’s ethnographic approach, relying heavily on interviews with party officials and focusing on the nature of their locally conditioned interactions across federal and provincial levels, is revealing of a complex set of interrelationships that have not been appreciated in the literature on political parties. The result is a far more nuanced understanding of the nature of Canadian political life.

R. Peter Woolstencroft, Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo:
Any student doing advanced work on the Canadian party system will need to read Grassroots Liberals. In an age when electoral analysts focus on the electronic and plebiscitary character of campaigns, this book is a powerful message to political scientists that the building blocks of party life are situated in electoral districts.