Holding on to Voters in Volatile Times: Bonding Voters Through Party Links with Civil Society

Political parties are increasingly confronted with electoral volatility. However, the support base of some parties is more unstable than others, these parties are more likely to lose or gain large numbers of voters from one election to the next. Although it has been established that parties’ links to civil society stabilized their electoral basis in the era of frozen party systems, it has not yet been investigated whether such links still fulfill this function in our volatile age. In this paper, we argue that traditional party connections with, for example, trade unions, as well as links to modern day civil society organizations continue to tie voters to parties. Using a novel data set covering 28 elections between 2005 and 2015 in 14 West European countries we test this hypothesis. We find that parties that have stronger links to civil society experience higher levels of voter stability. Moreover, we conclude that this relationship holds for parties regardless of party ideology and party size. Our results demonstrate that parties’ societal embeddedness should continue to play a role in understanding party competition in the 21st century.