Political parties in Western democracies are thought to be in crisis the last few decades. Especially aspects of the party in relation to society, the so-called ‘party on the ground’ in Mair’s (1994) terms, appear to have seriously weakened. Features of this crisis involve a decline of trust in parties (e.g. Dalton & Weldon, 2005), a reduced party identification leading to increased electoral volatility (e.g. Drummond, 2006) and a decline in the number of party members (e.g. Van Biezen et al, 2012). These tendencies put the linkage function of parties under pressure: citizens no longer consider parties as trustworthy intermediaries that channel their interests to government officials.
As a reaction, citizens have increasingly sought for other forms of participation to influence public policy. These forms are in general not organized by the political elite, and are hence less institutionalized. They include boycotting products, signing petitions and taking part in street demonstrations (Barnes & Kaase, 1979).
Party membership, which is considered as institutionalized political participation, is often contrasted to these non-institutionalized forms (Hooghe & Mariën, 2012). In this paper, we question this mutual exclusion and investigate to what extent party members engage in this kind of non-institutionalized participation, and which factors (dissatisfaction with membership, post-materialistic values, resources, etc.) could explain their participation behavior. This will allow us to estimate whether party members are pursuing their goals (also) with other means in contemporary society or whether this is a complete distinct activity performed by another kind of people. In order to conduct this analysis, we rely on data gathered in recent party member surveys in four Belgian parties.
This paper fits nicely in the workshop as it focuses on possible synergies between party membership and social movement participation, which is the one of the three major goals of the workshop.
