It is widely assumed that political parties need to have members in order to fulfill their functions in a representative democracy (drawing up platforms, candidate nomination and electoral mobilization), and more generally in terms of their legitimacy (Scarrow, 2000). In national legislation, the concept of the membership party is also (usually implicitly) the standard. Parties without members are regarded as an anomaly. In the theoretical literature on party types, however, the evolution from Duverger’s mass party to the catch-all party (Kirchheimer, 1966), the electoral-professional party (Panebianco, 1988) and/or the cartel party (Katz and Mair, 1994) suggests an increasing marginalization of members within the party organization. In the business firm party type (Hopkin and Paolucci, 2003) party members seem to have lost any role whatsoever – which makes the question of the no member party urgent.
This paper will address the question to which extent party members are a necessary condition for the functioning of democracy in two ways. From a normative perspective we ask why a party should have members. The literature provides hardly answers, as it is taken for granted that political parties are membership organizations. But why should this be necessary? On which concept of democracy is this claim based? Given the freedom of association one could argue that parties have the right to choose the form of organization they prefer, even if they wish to exclude members.
In the empirical part of the paper the functioning of no-member parties will be discussed. Two examples, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands and the Lega dei ticinesi in Switzerland will be analyzed in-depth and compared with membership parties in order to determine how they work and fulfil the main functions of political parties (as indicated above).
