Party membership is often cited as uniformly in decline across European democracies. However, this might be an untenable statement as a look at annual party-level data of 47 parties in six European countries between 1960-2010 reveals. Ann-Kristin Kölln argues that almost a quarter of the parties have not been losing members and that membership decline can be explained by a party’s level of institutionalisation. The more consolidated parties are, the fewer members they have. Only few differences between party families are observable

Kölln, Ann-Kristin

LSE Research Online

By Democratic Audit UK 2015-7-27Not all parties lose members but those that do are older andmore institutionaliseddemocraticaudit.com /2015/07/27/not-all-parties-lose-members-but-those-that-do-are-older-and-more-institutionalised/Party membership is often cited as uniformly in decline across European democracies. However, this might be anuntenable statement as a look at annual party-level data of 47 parties in six European countries between 1960-2010reveals. Ann-Kristin Kölln argues that almost a quarter of the parties have not been losing members and thatmembership decline can be explained by a party’s level of institutionalisation. The more consolidated parties are,the fewer members they have. Only few differences between party families are observable.Credit: Scorpoins and Centaurs, CC BY NC 2.0Almost all political parties in modern democracies take pride in a large membership size. Members are desirable forfinancial, organisational, programmatic, and legitimacy reasons. And yet, research shows that party membership hasbeen declining across European democracies throughout the past decades. For example, a recent House ofCommons research paper states that less than 1 per cent of the British electorate is enrolled in a political partytoday; in 1983, it was still 3.8 per cent. Survey researchers employing micro-level theories have made greatheadway in explaining the increasing unwillingness of citizens to enrol in parties. An entirely new party-level datasetenabled now also testing party-level explanations of party membership decline. Are some types of parties moreexposed to membership decline than others?Membership decline is not uniform across parties. The officially reported annual data of 47 parties in Denmark,Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom between 1960 and 2010 show what country-level studies could not: a substantial number of parties has not been losing members in the past decades. Around23 per cent of the analysed parties show either patterns of growth or stability over time. Figure 1 illustrates thedevelopment in membership ratios (membership size/ size of the electorate) of some of Europe’s ‘success stories’.Membership size measured on the party-level reveals substantial variation that aggregate country-level dataconceal.1/4Figure 1. Party-level membership/electorate ratios for selected parties in European countries. Frp: Progress Party;Grüne: Alliance ‘90/The Greens; KD: Christian Democrats; MP: Green Party; NO: Norway; DE: Germany; SE:Sweden.Two party-level approaches exist that proposeexplanations for the variation in membershipdevelopment. The life-cycle approach explainsmembership size by a party’s different life-phases orlevels of institutionalisations, whereas the modernizationapproach suggests a pattern of development according tothe ideological family a party belongs to. The main ideabehind the life-cycle approach is that a party is facing newopportunities, challenges and incentives at every stage ofits existence. The necessity or desirability of partymembership changes throughout a party’s life cycle. Forexample, at the beginning of a party’s life cycle, visibilityand initial electoral support are crucial for party survival. Alarge and loyal membership base can assist in that.Accordingly, a party will exert greater efforts to increase itsmembership size at an early stage of the life cycle. Duringlater stages when the party is already established,members are less important and the parties’ efforts inattracting them subside. Therefore, the life-cycle approachpredicts that membership size should increase during an early stage of institutionalisation and fewer members enrolas the party institutionalises.The modernization approach is complementary to this. It suggests that parties of certain party families should bemore exposed to membership decline than others. In general, modernization theories propose a shift in citizens’prioritised values from materialist to post-materialist values. Citizens connect less to parties that do not capture thenew politics values, while new parties representing post-materialist values, such as ecological parties, should be onthe rise. Additionally, the successful implementation of welfare states and the decline of religiosity over the lastcentury should lessen the appeal of social-democratic and Christian parties. Parties belonging to those familiesshould be more heavily impacted by membership decline.The results of multilevel modelling and time-series analyses show some support for both theories. Figure 2, forexample, illustrates the development of membership ratios for three different age groups of parties: those that werefounded before the end of World War II (labelled ‘old’), those that were founded after World War II  (labelled ‘middle’)and those that were founded after 1980 (labelled ‘young’). The y-axis displays values of percentage changes, i.e.the percentage change in the membership ratio in one year compared to the previous year.The graph supports the life-cycle approach, as ‘old’ parties have continuously a negative growth rate. It means thatparties founded before 1945 continuously lost party members between 1960 and 2010. Middle-aged parties, on theother hand, have undergone a more mixed development, which sometimes also included consecutive growths inmembership ratios during the 1970s, for example. Finally, the group of ‘young’ parties shows the strongestfluctuations in the beginning of their recording but with a number of straight gains in the late 19802 and mid-1990s.Calculating average growth rates per age group validates these findings. Old parties yield a growth rate of -3.46 (sd= 2.03), middle-aged parties yield -0.42 (sd = 5.70) and young parties yield 0.60 (sd = 16.04). Therefore, partiesfounded before 1945 have annually lost, on average, 3.46 per cent in their membership ratio over the period 1960-2010. The difference between the groups of old and middle-aged parties is also statistically significant.Figure 2. Parties’ percentage changes per age group.2/4The modernization approach also finds support in thedata, yet to a smaller degree, as Figure 3 illustrates. Itshows again the percentage change in membership ratiosover time for three party families (Chr: Christian; Soc:social-democratic; Eco: ecological). Parties belonging tothe ecological party family have experienced considerablefluctuation especially in the earlier years. Nonetheless, itis the only party family, which has mostly experiencedpositive percentage changes since the mid-1990s. Incomparison, the social democratic party family has beenrecording only negative percentage changes since theearly 1980s. Only the very last change between 2009 and2010 is positive again due to the British Labour Party’sgains in membership of around 0.08 percentage points inmembership ratios.Likewise, the graph shows that Christian parties havecontinuously experienced negative percentage changessince the 1980s. All three patterns provide support for themodernization approach, which is further validated by theparty families’ growth rates. Christian and social-democratic parties have annually lost, on average, 2.15 per centand 1.68 per cent of their membership ratio, respectively. Green parties gained, on average, 1.30 per cent everyyear. However, the differences in growth rates are not statistically significant so that the results only providesuggestive evidence for the modernization approach.Figure 3. Parties’ percentage changes per party-family belonging.On the basis of these results, party membership declinecan no longer be considered the norm across Europeandemocracies. Almost 23 per cent of the analysed partiesfrom six European countries do not show signs of decline.However, the findings also show that membership declinefollows some pattern. The more consolidated parties are,the fewer members they hold. This also makes sensebecause more established parties require fewergrassroots members to spread the message, compared tonew parties without an established network. As a partyconsolidates it faces different opportunities andchallenges and it becomes less dependent on a largemembership size. And while some party families appearto be more heavily affected by membership decline thanothers, few clear-cut patterns were detected. At the sametime, it is noteworthy that the ecological party familystands out as the only group of parties that is growing inmembership size.—This article is a summary of this article from the Party Politics ‘Party membership in Europe: testing party-levelexplanation of decline’. It represents the views of the author, and not those of Democratic Audit or the LSE. Pleaseread our comments policy before posting. 3/4—Ann-Kristin Kölln is COFAS Marie Curie Fellow and Postdoctoral researcher at the Departmentof Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. She is also Fellow at d|part, a think tank forpolitical participation.4/4

Not all parties lose members but those that do are older and more institutionalised

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