The Party on the Ground: Evolving or Evacuating?

Abstract

Having once relied on large grassroots memberships, the party on the ground is held to be in long-term, possibly terminal, decline. As Peter Mair argued in Ruling the Void, “the zone of engagement—the traditional world of party democracy where citizens interacted with and felt a sense of attachment to their political leaders—is being evacuated”. On the one hand, citizens are less motivated to join parties (or even to turn out to vote for them). On the other, party elites are said to have lost interest in maintaining the same presence on the ground since they no longer have the same need for members, whether in terms of their money, time, or ideas. And even if party elites may still periodically promote drives to boost the party on the ground, this is claimed by many scholars to be more a matter of style than substance. The proposed panel addresses the question of how the party on the ground has changed over the past decades. It comprises studies covering key questions such as the role of social capital and information technologies in the recruitment of party members; why young people join mainstream parties at a time when most of their counterparts seem disengaged; the changes in intra-party power structures affecting grassroots members amid moves to extend rights to ‘supporters’; and the extent to which parties over several decades maintained or withdrew from the physical presence on the ground provided by their local branches. The four papers, covering a total of eight countries, use a variety of innovative approaches to examine the party on the ground, including membership surveys, elite questionnaires, and telephone directory archives. They thus, collectively, provide novel insights into this face of party organization which has often been overlooked in studies of political parties.

Title	Details
Ambitious young conservatives: How party ideology affects policy and office motivations	View Paper Details
Opening up candidate selection to (party) voters: The opinion of local politicians	View Paper Details
Online and offline social capital as catalyst for political mobilisation: the case of digital native political parties	View Paper Details
Branches on the line: Mapping the rise and fall of the party on the ground	View Paper Details