(Bloomberg) --

Candidates vying to succeed Boris Johnson as ruling Conservative Party leader and British prime minister have a very small electorate in mind -- just 0.4% of UK voters. 

After Tory MPs whittle down the candidates to a final two, the job of picking the winner falls to about 175,000 grassroots Tory party members. That’s actually more than when Johnson himself won the leadership contest in 2019, but far short of the 47.6 million adults eligible to vote in a general election.

The Conservative Party doesn’t officially release the actual number of members eligible to vote, though a according to a person familiar with the matter, it was 160,000 three years ago. The party sets out the timetable for the leadership contest on Monday.

According to the latest data for 2020 compiled by the Queen Mary University of London and the Sussex University Party Members Project, 63% of Conservative Party grassroots are male. On average they’re in they’re late 50s -- but four in ten are over 65, with only 6% aged 18-24. 

They tend to be better off, with eight of ten saying they in the three highest economic and social groups by wealth and education. Meanwhile, over nine in ten identify as white British, and nearly half of them live in southern England. 

“We’ve been surveying party members since 2013 and there’s been little or no change in their demographics since then,” Tim Bale, professor of politics who conducted the research, said in an interview. “In a nutshell, they’re not that representative of the UK as a whole.”

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