Party Membership vs. Other Participation Options: Choices and Representativeness

• In Event: New Forms of Party Affiliation

Abstract

There is a well-known overall trend towards party membership decline in parties in parliamentary democracies (Van Biezen, Mair, and Poguntke 2012) and some evidence that these patterns may hold in other parts of the world and under different regime types (Whiteley 2011; Cross and Gauja 2014). Past research has suggested that such changes may be qualitative as well as quantitative, coinciding with shifts in what types of people join parties (Scarrow and Gezgor 2010). To the extent that party members have traditionally been demographically and politically unrepresentative of the wider party electorate, qualitative change has the potential to make parties’ memberships more congruent with their voters (Heidar and Wauters 2019), but so far there is only limited evidence about the extent to which such changes are occurring more generally, and about the forces that may be driving the changes. This paper tries to resolve some of the question by investigating changes in patterns of partisan participation, looking particularly at participation by younger citizens and by women, two groups that traditionally have been underrepresented in party activities. It first considers previous research that identifies forces that may be driving changing participation patterns among these sub-groups, then uses data from multiple waves of the World Values Survey in 18 countries to assess how well the evidence fits these predictions in a diverse set of democracies. The findings raise questions about some common assertions about the extent to which changes in patterns of party membership reflect shifting participation preferences or displacement of participation to other arenas. The paper then probes these findings by further examining patterns and drivers of change using country-level longitudinal data.

Authors

• Susan Scarrow, University of Houston

• Jamie M. Wright, University of Houston