Which members? Using cross-national surveys to study party membership

Abstract

Reports of party membership have documented steep declines in formal enrollment in many countries, but numbers alone tell us little about the systemic causes or likely implications of such drops. Existing cross-national surveys can help illuminate the extent and consequences of these changes. Unfortunately, they are difficult to use for this purpose because differences in question wording and institutional differences in the meaning of party membership produce unstable results. This paper proposes to overcome these obstacles by using behavioral measures of party membership in survey-based studies of party membership. We demonstrate that such measures produce results which are more consistent across surveys and therefore more meaningful. We then illustrate their utility by using a behaviorally-qualified measure to study how party membership decline has affected parties' ability to mobilize grassroots partisan participation. Our analysis also shows that even though reported party membership declined from the 1990s to the 2000s, there was surprisingly little change in this decade in the number of politically active partisans.

Quotas, women's leadership and grassroots women activists: Bringing women into the party?

“…We are interested in both groups because some of the mechanisms outlined above involve a shift in demand for active party members (e.g., future candidates), not just members per se . Moreover, while overall a large portion of party members are not active (Ponce & Scarrow 2016), the gender gap is generally larger for active members as compared to passive members. Thus, there is reason to suspect that some different factors may be at play.…”

“…While our hypotheses focus on the effects of the party‐level (demand‐side) determinants of participation, our analysis also controls for supply‐side effects determined by individual differences. Most studies of political participation find that individual resources and characteristics shape participation within parties (Ponce & Scarrow 2016). We include this control because gender differences in the distribution of these resources could account for lower rates of women's party membership.…”

Party Members and High-Intensity Participation: Evidence from Brazil

“…The level of participation and the activities performed by party members vary significantly when comparing different parties and countries. The reduction in aggregate levels of membership largely reflects the loss of inactive or relatively uncommitted party members, rather than the departure of activists, who form a much more stable group (Ponce and Scarrow 2016). Surveys with party members have shown that most members have low levels of internal participation; however, every party has a strong core of highly active members who scarcely make up 10% of the total (Scarrow 2015: 156-174;Gauja and van Haute 2015).…”

The expanding party universe: Patterns of partisan engagement in Australia and the United Kingdom

“…While studies of party membership have provided important insights into why, and how, citizens engage with parties, they sit within a normative conception of democracy that sees membership-based parties as central to the operation of representative politics (Allern and Pedersen, 2007: 70; van Haute, 2011: 14–16; Whiteley et al, 1994: 7). As almost all of this research relies on self-reported data from political parties as to who ‘counts’ as a party member (Ponce and Scarrow, 2016: 680), interest in membership has been concerned primarily with the traits and activities of those individuals who appear on parties’ membership lists, with limited consideration of the significance of relying on this formal status and the scale of participatory activity that it captures.…”