Organization, Time and Public Support: Variations in Party Membership Levels in Europe and Beyond

Party membership decline is not a universal phenomenon, particularly when the figures are analyzed at the party level (Kölln, 2016; Paulis, Sierens and van Haute, 2017; Achury et al., 2020). In addition, there are still very few attempts to take the study of party membership beyond the advanced democracies, which could expand our knowledge about recruitment patterns and the reasons behind party-level fluctuations. The paper analyzes the impact of several variables (organizational, time/lifecycle, and popular support) on cross-party membership in 25 countries (PPDB round 1b dataset), covering third-wave democracies, post-communist countries, and advanced democracies. With a cross-sectional perspective, we evaluate the influence of three sets of variables: 1) the incentives for party enrollment, which includes the costs and benefits of membership (decentralization and intraparty democracy, barriers to entry, incentives from national party laws, new types of affiliation, and party family) and the internal representativeness (gender balance in the main executive party organ, and the existence of thematic sections, e.g. youth or women); 2) the ‘time effect’, measured both nationally (democratic experience) and at the party level (party lifecycle, party origins, and time the party took to gain access to the national government); 3) the public support, measured in national terms (general trust in political parties) and at the party level (party ID). By using systematic data at the national level (not only as control variables), the paper adopts a multilevel approach to understand the variations in party membership across parties.