Holding on to voters in volatile times: Bonding voters through party links with civil society

Nick Martin,Sarah L De Lange,Wouter Van Der Brug

doi:10.1177/1354068820980304

Abstract

Political parties are increasingly confronted with electoral volatility. However, the support for some parties is more stable than that of others. Although it has been established that parties’ links to civil society stabilised their electorates in the period until the 1980s, it has not yet been investigated whether such links still fulfil this function in our volatile age. In this paper, we argue that traditional party connections, as well as links to modern day civil society organisations, continue to tie voters to parties. Using a novel dataset covering 149 parties in 29 elections in 14 West European countries, we establish that parties with stronger links to civil society do indeed have a more stable support base. This relationship holds for parties of the left and right. Our results demonstrate that parties’ societal embeddedness continues to play a role in understanding party competition in the 21st century.

Highlights

Political parties are increasingly confronted with high levels of electoral volatility
We develop a measure that expresses the connectedness of key party elites to organisations in civil society by deploying the extensive and growing data set on candidates memberships of categories of organisations in civil society provided by the Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS)
In Model 1 we explore the impact of organisational density on electoral volatility

Summary

Introduction

Political parties are increasingly confronted with high levels of electoral volatility. To measure parties’ ties to society, we use three key independent variables at the party level: 1) the ratio between a party’s vote and its number of members and 2) the proportion of a parties electorate in membership of a trade union – together capturing what Bartolini and Mair (1990) refer to as organisational density -, and 3) the average number of membership organisations to which party candidates belong – capturing what we introduce as parties’ connective density.

Results

Conclusion