Party guests or party crashers? Non-members’ political engagement across party organizations

Abstract

Over the past decade, many parties have created new possibilities for affiliating and involving citizens, often rivalling the classic conception of party membership. So far, the existing literature has mainly focused on classifying these new and different types of affiliates. However, little attention has been paid to what these “non-full-membership” options imply in terms of formal rights and obligations. We explore here the opportunities that parties offer to non-members to participate and get involved in intra-party activities and we contrast them with the rights and obligations of full, fee-paying, traditional members. This article addresses this gap based on an original database consisting of membership rules in 68 parties in 13 established democracies. We not only map the current landscape of rules managing the involvement of non-members within parties, but also explore potential factors- party family and size- explaining the variation across parties. We find a strong association between party family and the range of possibilities for non-members’ involvement with parties on the left and environmental parties providing more space for the participation of non-members. We also find that smaller parties tend to involve more non-full-members by allocating more rights to them. Our findings and new database provide a first step for future research to study the regulation of the involvement of non-members in intra-party activities, what determines it, and how it affects the traditional concept of party membership and societal linkage.

Juntos pero no revueltos. Miembros, simpatizantes, y el Partido Democrático en Italia

“…Comparatively speaking, while Italian parties feature significant variations in their organizational settings, especially regarding the role of members and intra-party democracy patterns, the PD is the party that gives more privileges to its members (at least until the recent revisions to the Five Star Movement's internal statutes). Using 2015 data from Sandri and von Nostitz (2021) on five Italian parliamentary parties 1 we evaluated the extent of the PD's affiliated members' rights and obligations. Figures 1 and 2 show the two indexes for measuring rights and obligations allocated to full-members: these variables are measured through two cumulative indexes of obligations imposed (0 to 4) and privileges distributed (0 to 8) to formal members (Cronbach's alpha: 0.26 and 0.77).…”