What Explains Party Membership in Post-Yugoslav Countries: Socialism, Nationalism, Clientelism or False Reporting?

Abstract

Abstract Earlier studies on party membership in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) led to the conclusion that political parties in new democracies are not inclined to build strong party organisations or invest in recruiting members. However, several recent individual country studies point to the opposite conclusions, indicating that there are significant cross ‑country variations in party membership figures across the post ‑communist region. By using a unique dataset on party membership in post ‑communist Europe, in this article we argue that the average membership level in CEE seems to be higher than in Western Europe. This holds true even when party membership figures for CEE countries are ‘corrected’ after conducting validity and reliability tests. Furthermore, we also find that party membership figures across CEE countries vary to a much higher degree than in established Western democracies. Our analysis shows that former Yugoslav countries are clustered at the top and other CEE countries at the bottom, leading to the conclusion that selection bias has been present in many studies on party membership that only included a limited number of post ‑communist countries. In order to explain higher levels of party membership in post ‑Yugoslav countries, we test three sets of explanatory variables, namely socialism, nationalism and clientelism. This exploratory study suggests that nationalist movements from the early period of transition, coupled with clientelistic politics, could serve as the most convincing explanation of high membership density in former Yugoslav countries.