Susan E. Scarrow

Declining memberships, changing members? European political party members in a new era

In recent years, membership in established political parties has been shrinking, but at the same time members of some parties have received increased powers to help select candidates, leaders and party policies. These twin trends make it important to re-examine who is joining today’s smaller parties. As parties shrink, do they attract a changed mixture of members, possibly with different political priorities? Using data from two sets of European surveys, our study investigates this question to study longitudinal change in party membership. The data show a growing gap between the age of party members and the general population. In most other respects, however, party members seem to be becoming more, not less, like their fellow citizens. This suggests that today’s smaller but more powerful memberships still have the potential to help link their parties to a wider electoral base.

Direct Democracy and Institutional Change: A Comparative Investigation

Is direct democracy on the rise around the world? Previous efforts to answer this question have investigated patterns of referendum usage and have found only small and isolated increases. In contrast, the current study focuses on patterns of institutional change and finds a broad movement to redesign institutions in ways that give citizens more opportunities to exercise direct control over political decision making.

Party subsidies and the freezing of party competition: Do cartel mechanisms work?

The number of countries offering public subsidies to political parties has vastly increased in recent decades, but there have been few attempts to assess how these subsidies affect political competition. Expectations about their likely impact vary widely. Some have described subsidies as key devices used by so-called ‘cartel parties’ to buttress their status and exclude new challengers. Others see subsidies as incentives that encourage new party formation and sustain fledgling parties that otherwise might disappear. The research reported here investigates the circumstances under which subsidies seem more likely to play one or the other of these roles by considering the development of party systems and party subsidies in European democracies. It finds little evidence that subsidies freeze out new parties, but there are signs that certain schemes may encourage party fragmentation.

Advanced Democracies and the New Politics

The popular pressures for reforms of the democratic process have mounted across the OECD nations over the past generation. In response, democratic institutions are changing, evolving, expanding in ways that may alter the structure of the democratic process. These changes include reforms of representative democracy proceses, the expansion of direct democracy, and the introduction of new forms of advocacy democracy. Indeed, some observers claim that we are witnessing the most fundamental transformation of the democratic process since the creation of mass democracy in the early 20th Century. This essay first summarizes the institutional reforms that are occurring in advanced industrial democracies. Given these changes, we consider how each of the three modes fulfills Dahls criteria for democracy, and how the shifting patterns of democratic access are transforming the relationship between citizens and their political system. This essay is adapted from their edited volume, Democracy Transformed? Expanding Political Opportunities in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Explaining Political Finance Reforms Competition and Context

This article examines how political strategies and institutional arrangements can shape the outcomes of debates over political finance reform. The article outlines two competing sets of assumptions about parties’ priorities regarding political finance regulations and explores the expectations generated by these differing assumptions. The central difference between these perspectives is whether parties view revenues primarily as a means to an electoral end, or whether they instead see fundraising as an end in itself. Each view yields slightly different predictions about the types of reforms various parties are likely to endorse under various political circumstances. The article then considers how these perspectives might illuminate actual party behavior by examining a series of political finance reform debates in Germany. Experiences here suggest that, even when scandals lend salience to the issue of party finance reform, parties will not necessarily sacrifice assured economic gains for possible political payoffs.

Party Competition and Institutional Change The Expansion of Direct Democracy in Germany

A wave of plebiscitary reforms has swept the German states in the past decade. This study uses explanations for cartel party failure as a starting point for investigating why the biggest German parties defected from their long-held consensus against direct democracy. The article shows that, in an increasingly competitive electoral environment, parties were willing to sacrifice long-term benefits in hopes of making short-term electoral gains. More generally, it suggests that the course of institutional reform cannot be understood merely by looking at distributions of party interests and voter preferences. Instead, it is also necessary to examine why political actors come to see their interests in a different light.

Party rules, party resources and the politics of parliamentary democracies How parties organize in the 21st century

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database Project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this article, we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focusing on parties’ resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older data sets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: that is, declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and the forms that this democratization takes.

Assessing the Political Impact of Candidate Selection Rules: Britain in the 1990s

Abstract Do candidate selection rules affect political outcomes, and if so, in what ways? Despite widespread agreement that such rules matter, observers remain divided as to whether more inclusive rules should yield candidates who are closer to or further away from a party’s likely voters. This question has seldom been investigated outside of US primary elections. This paper aims to help fill this gap by investigating British parties’ experiences with various candidate selection rules. Using data from the 1992 and 1997 British election and candidate studies to map the distance between parties’ candidates and voters, it asks whether rule differences could explain the relative proximity of the two groups. Contrary to the fears of those who worry about unrepresentative or unstrategic member activists, it finds evidence that more inclusive selection procedures may result in a closer alignment between the views of party candidates and party voters.

New Challenges of Intra-Party Democracy: Grassroots Activists, Instant Members, and Cyber-Militants

Political parties in established parliamentary democracies are confronting three strong trends that change their relationships to supporters: declining voter loyalty, declining party membership, and the declining importance of cleavage politics. This chapter will highlight two organizational responses to such challenges: the expansion of intra-party democracy and the introduction of new forms of party membership. These changes are generally presented by parties as responses to supporters’ weakening ties. Yet party supporters are seldom a homogenous group, and party voters and party members do not necessarily share identical priorities. Thus, parties that expand internal democracy may unintentionally create new conflicts between the member ‘stakeholders’ and the political ‘consumers’ who are the party’s potential voters. This chapter uses examples from Great Britain and Canada to illustrate some of the different ways that parties in these countries have been handling the potential conflicts created by shifts towards more open and more internally democratic party organizations.

Does local party organisation make a difference? Political parties and local government elections in Germany

Do large and locally organised memberships represent an electoral asset for political parties in a mass media age? Years of political science discussions of different models of party organisation have produced little evidence about whether, or in what way, alternate models matter. This article examines a survey of 549 SPD and CDU local party organisations for evidence of whether ‘mass’ characteristics are associated with electioneering differences. The study finds that mass‐style organisation is associated with more active local campaigns. Local parties which are active throughout the year and which can draw on relatively large membership bases run more active and more varied campaigns.