Party Membership Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Early cadre or elite political parties included members of legislative chambers who met to choose leaders, participate in the organization and management of the chamber, and perhaps to coordinate or procure resources for their electoral campaigns. With the expansion of the right to vote, the attendant need for extensive campaign organizations, and particularly the rise of parties of extra parliamentary origin, the concept of party membership is now applied less to elected officials (who remain members of party caucuses or other similar organizations, but who are more often identified simply as “Social Democrats” or “Conservatives”) than to those who have joined an extra governmental organization.

In most countries, party membership is acquired in the same way that membership is acquired in other voluntary organizations: the would-be member applies for admission, is accepted, and accepts both the rights and obligations of the party. Most common among the obligations is the payment of a membership fee, but others (frequently ignored) may include a number of hours of party work or public support of the party’s nominees. Most common among the rights of membership is the right to participate, either directly or through internally elected representatives, in such party decisions as the selection of candidates, the choice of party leaders, and the formulation of the party manifesto. In many cases, formal party membership—often of some specified duration—is a prerequisite to nomination as a party candidate for public office. For example, the rules of the major Australian parties require that anyone seeking a party’s nomination for office must have been a paid-up member for between six and twelve months (depending on the party).

In addition to individual members, some parties also have corporate or affiliated members—those who are regarded as members of the party by virtue of their membership in a related organization, for example a trade union affiliated with a Social Democratic Party. In some cases, members of the affiliated organization must contract in before they are considered party members, while in others they are given the opportunity to contract out. While affiliated members may have the same rights within the party as individual members, often they are represented by their organization’s leaders rather than participating in party governance directly.

Parties in the United States are exceptional in that they are often surrounded by party clubs, which, while they do have formal membership, are not formally part of the party itself. For example, the Central Baltimore County Democratic Club is a membership organization; it has Democratic in its name and is made up of Democratic Party supporters; but, legally it is not part of the Democratic Party of Maryland. Rather, U.S. party membership has been identified with electoral support and institutionalized in state-run systems of partisan registration. Party registrants are different from members, however, in that they do not have any obligations to the party, and the party cannot refuse their membership or expel them. In states without partisan registration, the idea of membership is even more vacuous, given that the quintessential party decision, candidate selection, is made by primary elections in which any registered voter can participate. In a number of cases, parties outside of the United States are adopting more American-like practices (e.g., the use of party-organized primaries to choose candidates) and allowing individuals who are not formal members to participate, thus blurring the distinction between members and supporters.

Despite the importance of party membership to the self-conception of many parties and the sometimes considerable efforts made to boost membership, levels of membership generally are both low and declining. At the end of the 1990s, on average less than 5 percent of the electorates of twenty European countries were party members, ranging from a high of 17.7 percent in Austria (the only country in which the figure was as high as 10 percent), to under 1.2 percent in Poland. Ten of the twenty countries showed figures under 4 percent. Moreover, in fifteen of the countries, the proportion of the electorate who were party members had declined over the previous two decades (or less in the case of the new democracies), and in many cases this decline may be better described as a collapse, with the median case showing a decline of more than 25 percent in the raw number of members, even as the pool of individuals eligible to become members increased.

Bibliography:

Heidar, Knut. “Party Membership and Participation.” In Handbook of Party Politics, edited by R. S. Katz and W. Crotty, 301–315. London: Sage Publications, 2006.
Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair, eds. How Parties Organize. London: Sage Publications, 1994.
Mair, Peter, and Ingrid van Biezen. “Party Membership in Twenty European Democracies, 1980–2000.” Party Politics 7, no. 1 (2001): 5–21.
Pedersen, Karina, Lars Bille, Roger Buch, Jørgen Elklit, Bernhard Hansen, and Hans Jørgen Nielsen. “Sleeping or Active Partners? Danish Party Members at the Turn of the Millennium.” Party Politics 10, no. 4 (2004): 367–383.
Scarrow, Susan E. Parties and Their Members. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Whitely, Paul, Patrick Seyd, and Jeremy Richardson. True Blues: The Politics of Conservative Party Membership. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

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