William Cross, Carleton University
Anika Gauja, University of Sydney
Exploring the Evolving Relationship between Members, Supporters, Advocacy Groups and Intra Party Decision Making in Australia.
While the relationships between political parties and civil society may have changed in recent decades, the formal role of parties within our democratic institutions has not. The key practical functions of parties remain the selection of candidates for public office (both at the legislative and leadership level), organizing election campaigns, developing and presenting policy alternatives and organizing legislatures and government formation. If parties interact differently with citizens today, these interactions are largely carried out through the parties’ fulfillment of these ascribed functions. Like parties elsewhere, the Australian parties have witnessed a decline in membership numbers and activism in recent years. One result of this has been to experiment with different forms of membership (for example, non-territorially based branches established to appeal to those primarily interested in policy) and to expand the traditional notion of membership to include ‘supporters’ in selected trials in candidate pre-selections.
We propose to examine both the formal and informal influence exerted by these groups of party supporters and members (delineating between them) in the traditional functions of parties identified above. The objective being to understand better the distribution of power among the different faces of the Australian parties and how they are responding to a decline in rank-and-file participation that they themselves have identified as a cause of concern.
