In the new issue of Party Politics, you will find an article I have written together with Paul Whiteley, Matthew Goodwin and Harold Clarke. The article deals with the predictors of party activism within the populist radical right.
Here is the abstract:
Recent decades have seen an upsurge of interest in populist radical right (PRR) parties. Yet despite a large body of research on PRR voters, there are few studies of the internal life of these parties. In particular, there is a dearth of research about why people are active in them. This article uses data from a unique large-scale survey of United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) members to investigate if drivers of voting support for these parties are also important for explaining party activism. Analyses show that traditional models of party activism are important for understanding engagement in UKIP, but macro-level forces captured in an expanded relative deprivation model also stimulate participation in the party. That said macro-level forces are not the dominant driver of activism.
You can find the paper here. Kai Arzheimer provides some great thoughts on the paper here.