Contacting and the Representative Performance of Mainstream Parties in Western Europe

The transformation of Western European party politics has been characterized as convergence of mainstream parties and their collective withdrawal from society. As a corollary, these parties have been said to abdicate their traditional representative functions. While the bulk of empirical studies has focused on mainstream parties’ representative performance in terms of articulating and aggregating citizens’ interests, we look at the more neglected question of whether these parties (still) integrate and mobilize citizens into the political process. We hold party contacting as a crucial indicator in that regard and ask whom mainstream parties contact and why. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems dataset, we first document the contacting patterns of Western European mainstream parties. We find that there are indeed tendencies of convergence among the old mainstream parties particularly in terms of the socio-demographic profile of the contacted. We then draw on data from the Political Party Database Project and party membership surveys to connect what is happening on the ground with what is happening in the party central office. Have Western European mainstream parties moved to a more money-intensive US model of campaigning or is campaigning still predicated on a time-intensive model of activist voluntarism? The questions we seek to answer lie at the heart of the debate about the development of political parties and the implications for democratic systems.