How Political Parties and Interest Groups are Rethinking Membership: Strategies and Implications

As political organizations, political parties and interest groups face a similar set of organizational challenges. Given their voluntary nature, key among these challenges is securing the ongoing support, involvement and participation of their core constituency. In this paper we adopt a ‘political organizations’ perspective to explore the ways in which political organizations (referring to groups and parties) rework and shape the means by which they seek to connect with their base. Specifically, we probe the development of strategies to affiliate individuals with organizations through either membership, supportership or both. Our core contention is that the literature on parties and IGs has treated membership and supportership as two ends of a spectrum, whereby gradations between them are demarcated by variations in the intensity of involvement. Instead, we suggest, the literature should disentangle this construction, rendering involvement a separate dimension from adjudicating on membership and supportership. In so doing, our broader aim to contribute to the further development of the sub-field of political organizations.