Party Member Activism

The general trend across Western Europe is that membership figures decline even though trends vary both within and across countries. In light of these general trends, parties are changing the ways in which they enable affiliation by opening up for other types of party affiliation such as B-members, Facebook supporters etc. However, the variation in partisan participation and hence in how parties provide participatory linkage is not only detectable outside traditional party membership but also within. Party member activism varies, as other types of political participation, in the degree, type and intensity of participation. The main purpose of this paper is to depict this variation and seek patterns. The analysis of party member activism, first, shows how much time party members spend on party activities. While hours spent in an average month is a nice quantifiable measure, the challenge is that previous studies have shown, that party members do not all agree on what to include as party activities. Hence, we explore further the group of members indicating that they do not spend any hours on their party, yet, does engage in specific activities. In the second and third parts of the analysis, we turn to more detailed studies of party member participation in different types of activities. In the second analysis, we focus on party member participation in the theoretically created categories of party members as campaign workers, financers and decision makers of the parties, while we in the third part of the analysis turn inductive and identify dimensions and patterns in party member activism across all parties.