Abstract
Students of political parties have been preoccupied with a trend that has been evident across most of the democratic world for some time, the decline of voluntary party organizations in the form of falling party memberships and reduced party activism. This occurs in most advanced democracies, and it raises serious concerns about the extent to which parties can remain rooted in civil society as opposed to being co-opted and absorbed by the state.
Susan Scarrow’s book is a wide-ranging and comprehensive analysis of these developments, which carefully examines the evidence relating to party decline in 19 democracies over time. She locates these trends in a historical setting, examines the scope and magnitude of the changes, closely analyses rival explanations and considers the factors that have contributed to them. She also goes on to discuss remedies that parties might pursue to try to deal with the problem. She has drawn on a large number of sources to map out these developments and extensively examines how parties are trying to respond to the challenges posed by declining membership. Many are changing their organizational structures, improving the communication between leaders and members, redefining what membership is and giving supporters and existing members new rights as a way of improving their incentives to get involved.
One of the chapters called ‘myths and realities of mass membership’ calls into question the claim that in the past, parties were nearly all mass organizations which have gradually withered away over time. She makes the point that democratic parties with large individual memberships have been the historical exception rather than the rule. They emerged from the expansion of the franchise in the 19th century and the gradual removal of restrictions on political activity and voluntary organizations that existed in many countries in the early part of that century. There is more than a whiff of nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ of mass party organization in some of the contemporary literature, and she does a masterful job in puncturing this myth.
All researchers on political parties face the problem of the lack of good data, and Susan Scarrow does the best job she can to collect together the existing data sources and to map out changes in membership and link them to alternative explanations of the changes. In doing this, she fully acknowledges the difficulties of comparing membership data across countries and over time. The explanations for decline include state subsidies, the growth of media-intensive campaigning which marginalizes activists, changes in patterns of participation in the population and cultural changes in society. However, there is a problem with the analysis which consists of eyeballing trends and trying to infer from them that a particular explanation is relevant. This is less than satisfactory, since among other things, it is unable to distinguish between different explanations that predict similar patterns of decline. The slow decline in membership observed in most countries is consistent with several rival explanations, and we can’t know which ones are relevant without further multivariate analysis.
One interesting innovation is to introduce a ‘multi-speed membership’ parties model. This is a new approach which discards the traditional model introduced by Duverger that conceives of party activists as being in the bullseye of a participation ‘dartboard’, with the inactive members being further out and the supporters at the edge. She conceives of voluntary activity in political parties as a series of fluid interlocking sets with members moving between activism and passive support at different times, and some non-members getting heavily involved in occasions such as in elections, while being wholly uninvolved most of the time. This conception broadens the definition of membership and looks at it as a part of a broader repertoire of forms of political participation. From this perspective, the decline in membership may not be as serious a problem as it first appears.
When thinking about the revival of voluntary party organization, she reviews arguments about reducing the costs of affiliation as well as introducing new forms of affiliation, such as ‘trial membership’, ‘cyber membership’, ‘sustainer membership’ and ‘followership’. Each category denotes a different level of commitment, and this approach relies heavily on information technology to make it work. Historically, parties have moved away from being rooted in groups defined by social class, ethnicity or geographical location which can provide collective social benefits to sustain their members. The emergence of the ‘catch-all’ party which tries to appeal to as many diverse individuals and groups as possible in order to win elections has changed this. So she believes that new forms of membership are needed in order to sustain voluntary party organizations in the future.
She is optimistic about parties providing greater political benefits as part of the renewal exercise, arguing that these should help to motivate members in the future. Overall, this book is a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in voluntary activities in political parties.