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First published online May 11, 2010

Declining memberships, changing members? European political party members in a new era

Susan E. Scarrow and Burcu GezgorView all authors and affiliations
Volume 16, Issue 6
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068809346078

Abstract

In recent years, membership in established political parties has been shrinking, but at the same time members of some parties have received increased powers to help select candidates, leaders and party policies. These twin trends make it important to re-examine who is joining today’s smaller parties. As parties shrink, do they attract a changed mixture of members, possibly with different political priorities? Using data from two sets of European surveys, our study investigates this question to study longitudinal change in party membership. The data show a growing gap between the age of party members and the general population. In most other respects, however, party members seem to be becoming more, not less, like their fellow citizens. This suggests that today’s smaller but more powerful memberships still have the potential to help link their parties to a wider electoral base.

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1.
We thank Ernesto Calvo, Tim Hellwig and anonymous reviewers for their help on this project. The Norwegian Social Science Data Services are the data archive and distributor of the ESS data.
2.
1. We replicated all of Widfeldt’s calculations using the same Eurobarometers and followed as closely as we could his coding and treatment of missing values. Our figures are similar, but not identical, to Widfeldt’s.
3.
2. Because the Eurobarometer and ESS measured education in slightly different ways, we recoded the Eurobarometer data on school leaving-age to approximate the ESS data on number of years of schooling. We do this by subtracting 5 from the respondent’s age at leaving school, assuming a school-starting age of five. In countries where the normal starting date differs, this assumption will affect the mean, but not the distance between the party and population means.
4.
3. The models also included country dummies not reported here.

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Published In

Volume 16, Issue 6
Pages: 823 - 843
Article first published online: May 11, 2010
Issue published: November 2010

Keywords

  1. Demographics
  2. ideological distance
  3. members
  4. membership composition

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Authors

Affiliations

Susan E. Scarrow
University of Houston, USA, [email protected]
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Burcu Gezgor
University of Houston, USA
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