Access to State Benefits, Less Membership Involvement? A Study of Parties, Advocacy Groups and Service Organizations in Norway and the UK

This paper contributes to the emerging literature that advocates the joint study of different voluntary membership organizations: parties, service organizations and advocacy groups. It does so by exploring changes in membership involvement in light of voluntary organizations` access to various state benefits. Contrary to existing studies that solely investigate the influence of state funding, this paper also includes indirect forms of state benefits, namely legal status and fiscal benefits. In line with existing literature we expect that access to state benefits will result in professionalization, which in turn will decrease membership involvement in both decision making and organizational activities. We theorize that the influence on membership involvement varies according to which benefit an organization accesses: while access to legal status and fiscal benefits will have weak and moderate influence respectively, access to state funding will exert strong influence on membership involvement and the related process of professionalization. Parties, advocacy groups and service organizations share similar organizational traits and processes of organizational maintenance (Fraussen and Halpin 2016). Hence, we expect that the hypothesized consequences of state benefits on professionalization and membership involvement will be the same across organizational types. To investigate the hypotheses, we study full lifecycles of voluntary membership organizations in two most different regulatory contexts, one permissive (Norway) and one constraining (UK). The longitudinal qualitative approach will allow us to observe organizational changes as organizations access state benefits at different times in their lifecycle. Data from public records, websites, archives and interviews will be collected and analysed.