Party Members and Activists

Emilie van Haute, Anika Gauja

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317524311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Membership of political parties is diverse. Not everyone participates and those who do, do not participate in the same way.

This book engages with the debate over the significance and future of political parties as membership organisations and presents the first broad comparative analysis of party membership and activism. It is based on membership surveys which have been administered, gathered and collated by a group of prominent party scholars from across Europe, Canada and Israel. Utilizing this rich data source together with the insights of party scholars, the book investigates what party membership means in advanced industrial democracies. In doing so, it provides a clearer picture of who joins political parties, why they do it, the character of their political activism, how they engage with their parties, and what opinions they hold.

This text will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, particularly to those interested in representation, participation, political parties and elections.

1
Introduction

Party membership and activism

Emilie van Haute and Anika Gauja

For decades, scholars have sought to understand why citizens join political parties and what influence can be achieved through party membership. Whether we think of political parties as grassroots or hierarchical organizations, individual members have important roles to play – as leaders, activists and political elites, as campaigners and foot-soldiers, as those who select personnel and formulate policy, or as those who simply provide legitimacy to the party by virtue of having signed up to the cause. Despite the prominence of theoretical models such as the mass and cartel parties, which prompt us to think about party membership in certain ways, the experience of membership is diverse. Not everyone participates; and not everyone participates in the same way.

Some accounts of membership – often those presented by the parties themselves – paint the role of members as important intermediaries between citizens and the state. Conceptualized as privileged political actors with rights and responsibilities by virtue of their status, party members possess significant decision-making powers over areas such as policy-making and candidate selection, as well as constituting an indispensable campaigning resource for party organizations. Others challenge the notion that the members and activists of political parties might be regarded as part of the political elite, citing the increasing autonomy of parliamentary parties, membership decline and evidence of muted participation.

Indeed, the role and importance of party members and activists has long been a topic of contestation and conjecture in the parties literature. This is in part a product of the challenge posed to the embedded view that political parties are a ubiquitous and necessary element of representative democracy by those who believe that political parties face a crisis of terminal decline, manifest by rapidly declining membership figures. The chapters in this book engage with the debate over the significance and future of political parties as membership organizations by presenting the first broad comparative analysis of party membership and activism that is based on available membership surveys. Utilizing this rich data source as well as the insights and access that can only be provided by a group of country experts, this book investigates what party membership means in democracies today, giving a better picture of who joins political parties, why they do it, the character of their political activism, how they engage with their parties and what opinions they hold.

This introduction presents an overview of the main theoretical questions and debates that have shaped, and continue to shape, party membership research. It does so against the broader question of the role and significance of party members and activists as political elites today. The first objective is to present the intellectual questions related to the study of party membership and to discuss the role of party membership as a social and political phenomenon. The second is to present some of the methodological challenges linked to the study of party members and the problems related to data collection. Finally, the introduction outlines the comparative analytical framework that is employed in each empirical chapter.

The role and significance of party members as a social and political phenomenon

The importance of party membership and the implications of its decline depend in large part upon the normative model of democracy that is invoked (Pedersen and Allern 2007). As Heidar (2007: 3) notes, ‘theoretically the impact of party members on democracy is viewed differently – from essential to irrelevant’. Those advocating a liberal conception of democracy stress accountability rather than participation as the central mechanism of democratic systems. In this view, mass participation in parties is not a prerequisite for parties to fulfil their functions. However, the defenders of a participatory model of democracy see participation through membership as a central mechanism linking citizens to the state and allowing interest organization. In this conception, ‘in a real sense party members make democratic politics possible’ (Seyd and Whiteley 1992: 3).

From the perspective of the political party, members are considered not only as a source of legitimacy (as evidence of popular support for the party’s activities), but also as an organizational resource that contributes to the systemic functionality of political parties (Katz 1990; Scarrow 1994, 1996; Webb et al. 2002: 10–13). Members provide labour and monetary resources for campaigning, a supply of candidates and potential leaders, provide the representative link to the community that is necessary for interest aggregation and articulation, as well as facilitating political education. If political parties are considered to be synonymous with, or constituted by their memberships, what consequence might declining memberships have for the role and function of political parties in contemporary democracies?

Conceptualizing and researching party membership at the aggregate level: Broad patterns of decline

Empirical research on party membership at the level of the political system has been based predominantly on aggregate membership figures. For the most part, early research consisted of case studies of single countries or parties often on the left side of the political spectrum (Seyd and Whiteley 1992; Whiteley et al 1994; Scarrow 1996; Gallagher and Marsh 2002) with few systematic cross-national comparisons. After Duverger (1954), Bartolini was one of the first to provide a comparative and historical perspective on social-democratic parties, comparing membership figures over the long term (1889–1978) (Bartolini 1983). He concluded that social-democratic parties were losing members, not to other political parties but rather through a process of disaffiliation, and raised the first doubts in the future of party membership as a form of political participation.

This trend was confirmed by Von Beyme (1985) regarding the socialist, communist and Christian democratic families in Germany and Italy, and by Sundberg for the Scandinavian countries (1987). The comparative effort was brought one step further thanks to the work of Katz and Mair (1992a, 1992b), who concluded that ‘despite sometimes gaining in terms of raw numbers of members, the parties in Western Europe have generally failed to maintain their initial share of the available membership pool’ (Katz and Mair 1992a: 334). Numerous scholars have since used Katz and Mair’s data for their own research (Widfeldt 1995; Ware 1996).

Katz and Mair’s data were updated in 2001 and expanded to include Central and Eastern European countries (Mair and van Biezen 2001). The update confirmed the (increasing) decline in the 1990s in all established democracies, however, new democracies were experiencing a different pattern. Other scholars confirmed the diagnosis (Widfeldt 1995; Scarrow 2000; Webb et al. 2002). Ten years later, research continues to stress that membership decline has deepened over time (Scarrow and Gezgor 2010; Whiteley 2011; van Biezen et al. 2012) and now concerns almost all democracies, with some variation at the party level (Delwit 2011a).

In the following section, we draw attention to some of the methodological problems concerning the validity and reliability of party membership data. However, a number of nuances need to be considered here in an examination of the broad trends of decline. First, the starting point of the comparison over time is crucial and has a huge impact on the conclusions regarding the evolution of party membership figures (Scarrow 2000; Norris 2002). Most comparative studies take 1945 as the starting point. Given that large membership-based parties were relatively rare before WWII, it may be that this reference period was characterized by exceptionally high membership figures (Scarrow 2000: 94), thereby influencing the conclusion of all analyses.

In addition to the empirical impact of this starting point, the normative model of the mass party present during this ‘golden age’ (Mair and van Biezen 2001: 7) is likely to condition assessments of the democratic impact of membership decline. As Scarrow (2000: 79) notes, ‘because mass parties emphasized enrolment and political education, and because they encouraged citizens to extend their political involvement beyond merely voting, they broadened the realm of citizen politics and provided concrete links between politicians and those they claimed to represent’. Any shift away from the mass party model is ‘likely to affect the wider texture of political life, since they are likely to reduce the extent to which parties function as outlets for, and stimulants to, civic participation’ (Scarrow 2000: 80).

Furthermore, the very nature of party membership means different things in different contexts. In the European setting, for example, membership has typically been seen as a crucial element of party organization, bringing with it a series of associational rights and responsibilities. In other contexts, party membership is understood as a synonym for party identification – that is, a proximity to a specific political party, which does not imply any formal organizational affiliation. This is especially the case with the United States (Berdahl 1942a, 1942b; Rokkan 1959; Whiteley 2011). ‘Looser’ conceptions of party membership might lead us, on one hand, to overestimate party membership figures. On the other, more stringent notions might unduly restrict what is seen (and counted) as partisan participation.

Finally, looking at party membership decline alone does not say anything about who is staying and who is leaving, for example, do parties lose peripheral inactive members or are they losing core active members? Similarly, the trend does not provide information on fluxes (Selle and Svåsand 1991). Do parties face a problem of recruitment or of retention? A further assumption that is made in accounts that link party membership decline with party organizational decline is that members form an important (and even inseparable) part of political parties. But is this assumption actually valid? In order to better understand this connection, we need to look more closely at the relationship between political parties and their members.

Analyzing party membership trends: Supply and demand

Scholars have tried to provide explanations of party membership trends, incorporating perspectives from both the individual and party levels. These explanations can be summarized as either ‘supply-side’ or ‘demand-side’ (Scarrow 1996). Supply-side explanations stem from the broader social changes that make citizens more reluctant to join political parties, whereas demand-side refer to the organizational and strategic reasons why parties might no longer seek to recruit members (Webb et al. 2002: 450).

On the supply-side, three explanations have been developed, rooted in the literature on political participation. The first is related to modernization theories and aims at explaining membership decline. Inspired by the literature on the decline of political participation, scholars have pointed to the development of post-industrial societies, shifts in participation repertoires (Norris 2002) and emergence of alternative modes of political participation (Lawson and Merkl 1988). This in turn is linked to higher levels of education and changes in values (post-materialism, individualism, lower levels of trust, etc.), affecting group-based memberships and favouring more atomized modes of participation (Marien and Quintelier 2011). Yet, this view is partly challenged at the micro-level. The resource model stresses the positive impact of the level of education on party affiliation and activism. While post-industrialization has brought higher levels of education, it has not produced higher levels of (party) participation. Furthermore, individual analyses have stressed the cumulative aspect of participation rather than the existence of strict borders between modes of participation. In another variant of the modernization theories, authors have sought to link economic development and party membership. According to Norris (2002), countries with lower development levels would count more members. Bartolini (1983) investigated the link between economic cycles in a country (growth, crises) and the levels of affiliation to social-democratic parties, but found no correlation.

A second group of explanations can be found in institutional factors. Authors have linked party membership rates to the type of regime (Bartolini 1983; Tan 2000), the size of the polity (Dahl and Tufte 1973; Tan 2000; van Biezen and Mair 2001; Weldon 2006), the electoral system (Norris 2002), the degree of party competition and party laws (Scarrow 1996; Pedersen 2003). These explanations help understanding fluctuations of membership figures over time and across countries.

Finally, short-term effects have also been employed to explain fluctuating membership levels. Authors have stressed the impact of strikes, unrests, or democratic transitions on membership levels (Gaxie 1977). However, most of the research has attempted to link membership and electoral and governmental cycles, some studies showing very limited congruence between the two (Bartolini 1983; Widfeldt 1999). Fisher (2000) found more convincing results – concluding that a bandwagon effect operates after electoral success to bring new affiliations. Spirals of demobilization ‘can be broken by a single election in which there is a sharp reversal of previous results’ (Fisher et al. 2006). According to Whiteley and Seyd (1998), this is due to the impact of success and defeat on the sense of political efficacy held by individuals and the group.

Whilst these supply-side explanations can partly account for the decline of party membership, they cannot explain why this decline affects some political parties more than others (Delwit 2011a). Demand-side explanations, rooted in the literature on party organizations and which refer to the recruitment strategies and capacities of parties, as well as the changing models of party organization, can bring additional insights. As previously noted, members notionally constitute an important resource for political parties. Seeing parties as rational unitary actors motivated by office-seeking goals (Scarrow 1994), some party scholars argue that party membership decline could be explained by a change in the parties’ calculus of the costs and benefits of membership recruitment. The basic argument is that, over time, the financial and ideological costs of recruiting members have exceeded the various benefits that parties gain in increasing membership (legitimacy, electoral, outreach, labour, financial, innovation, personnel and linkage) (Bowler and Farrell 1992; Farrell and Webb 2000; Norris 2002).

Alternatively, some have argued that parties do not voluntarily decide to stop recruiting members, but that they face increasing difficulties to attract them with specific incentives (Ware 1992). Parties lose their attractiveness due to the decline of clientelism, patronage and symbolic prestige of political functions, but also due to the increased competition of alternative modes of political participation. Furthermore, the decline of clear-cut ideologies and programmes and the blurring of party structures make specific political parties less able to attract members on the basis of a unique product (Carty and Blake 1999; Young and Cross 2002). These developments have been driven by the shift in party organizations to more professionalized campaigning forms as manifest in the catch-all (Kirchheimer 1966) and electoral professional models (Panebianco 1988). In these models new communications technologies have facilitated the transmission of an unmediated message from the leadership to the electorate, without the mediation of the party membership. The organizational synergy between party and the state in the cartel model has further dispensed with the need for members as resources, as political parties draw instead on the financial and non-monetary (for example, broadcast time) benefits of public office (Katz and Mair 1995; 2009).

The link between evolution and muted memberships has, however, been questioned. Some have argued that in order to ‘make partisan life appear more attractive and party decisions more legitimate’ (Scarrow 1999: 351) parties have re-valued members; increasing the rights and role of members in their organizations, and seeking a more diversified membership base (Bille 2001; Hopkin 2001). Others argue that, despite the spread of public funding, the financial contribution of members remains important, both in material and symbolic terms (Hofnung 1996; Scarrow 1996). Finally, authors have contested the idea that members are less relevant as ambassadors in the community and as vote multipliers, especially through labour-intensive work during electoral campaigns. The development of new campaign techniques has not made the work of members obsolete (Gallagher and Marsh 2002; Pedersen 2003). Several studies have even shown a positive relationship between activists’ involvement in the electoral campaign and electoral results for the party (Seyd and Whiteley 1992; Poguntke 2002; Fisher et al. 2012; van Aelst et al. 2012).

In this sense, theoretical models of party organization provide useful heuristics through which to view the changing significance of party memberships. However,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• List of party names and abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Party membership and activism
• 2 Party membership in Spain and congress delegates
• 3 Party membership in Belgium: From the cradle to the grave?
• 4 Party membership in Canada
• 5 Party membership in Denmark: Fluctuating membership figures and organizational stability
• 6 Party membership in Germany: Rather formal, therefore uncool?
• 7 Party membership in Israel: The era of party primaries
• 8 Party membership in Italy
• 9 Party membership in the Netherlands
• 10 Party membership in Norway: Declining but still viable?
• 11 Party membership in Britain: A minority pursuit
• 12 Conclusion: Members and activists of political parties in comparative perspective
• References
• Index