Why are Political Parties Declining in the Advanced Democracies? A Multi-Level Analysis of Trends in Party Activism, Party Membership and Partisanship in Europe, 2002‒2012

The decline of party membership and activism in the advanced industrial democracies is now well documented (Dalton, 2005; Katz et al.,1992; Mair and Van Biezen, 2001; Scarrow, 2000; Biezen Van, Mair and Poguntke, 2012). It is a trend which serves to weaken democracy because it undermines the core institutions of civil society, namely, political parties. Part of the explanation for this appears to be the ever closer relationship between the state and parties, which brings with it regulation and dependency, and threatens to turn parties into ‘public utilities’ (van Biezen, 2004; Whiteley, 2011). In the long run this is likely to mean that parties will increasingly represent the interests of the state to citizens, rather than the interests of citizens to the state. However, the conclusions about the role of state regulation in influencing party activity rest on cross-sectional evidence (Whiteley, 2011, 2014), and it is well known that cross sectional data can be a poor guide to trends over time. The purpose of this paper is to model the factors which determine declining party activity across advanced industrial democracies, using multi-level pooled cross-sectional time-series data from the European Social Survey (ESS) Cumulative File, and a variety of measures of party support. This file contains six waves of surveys conducted from 2002 to 2012, and makes it possible to test hypotheses about the determinants of declining party support over time. As well as examining trends in party activism and party membership, the paper will also look at trends in partisanship, that is, the psychological attachment of individuals to political parties, which has been the object of a lot of research in electoral behaviour (see Campbell et al. 1960; Butler and Stokes, 1969; Whiteley et al. 2013).