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.
Highlights
The continued progressive decline of electoral turnout and party membership in advanced democracies triggered a debate of the growing irrelevance and inability of parties to act as instruments for linking society with the state and aggregating preferences (Mair, 2013:16)
The recent literature often argues that the introduction of new forms of party affiliation, such as formalized supporters’ networks, or of participatory opportunities for non-members, is a party organizational response to cope with such challenges as decreasing voter loyalty and declining party membership (Scarrow 2015)
We look at the distribution of power within parties by accounting for the activities or privileges traditionally reserved for members that are offered to all the other categories of partisan affiliation (Gauja and Van Haute 2014)
Summary
The continued progressive decline of electoral turnout and party membership in advanced democracies triggered a debate of the growing irrelevance and inability of parties to act as instruments for linking society with the state and aggregating preferences (Mair, 2013:16). Even though it is rather uncommon for supporters to pay much for being involved in party activities, and they pay markedly less than membership dues, they represent a way to encourage smaller donations and to collect significant amounts of funding during specific political events such as open primaries (Scarrow 2018; von Nostitz & Sandri 2018) This new strategy of internal organization allows for a more flexible engagement with parties as it provides different channels of affiliation, each offering varying opportunities to access party activities and internal decision-making, adjusted to individual needs. The article compares, and contrasts their respective rights and obligations, in order to assess their respective role and power within the party These two main alternative affiliations represent two different organizational trajectories, one resulting in party membership, the other resulting in weaker, more flexible party ties. Our exploratory findings show a strong association between party family and the degree of non-members’ involvement, and that smaller parties tend to involve more non-members
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