One major Swedish political party has taken a step towards increased openness – and perhaps towards solving its recruitment problems – by giving non-party members the right to nominate other non-party members to the party list in the upcoming elections in 2014 (SvD 24/8/2013). Despite this seemingly radical move, political parties remain important gate-keepers, with a monopoly on paths to political representation. A vital question is thus how open parties are to reaching out to new groups in society.
Parties have been successful as semi-public professional organizations. However the role of party organisations as ‘parties on the ground’ is downplayed today (Wauters 2010), as is – at least in Sweden - their traditional though time and resource consuming function of recruiting and educating new members. Parties give priority to media strategies in order to win their opinion electorate, while facing two closely related challenges: the problem of declining and ageing memberships and, paradoxically, also the problem of persisting underrepresentation of immigrants and minorities of immigrant origin, which comprise a continuously increasing share of the population in European polities, in party organizations and in elected office. The question addressed here is how open party organisations are to attracting new groups in society and what role institutional factors, such as network recruitment - that stresses the role of networks and associations in recruitment and nomination of candidates - and democratization of intra-party nomination processes, play in facilitating the openness of party organizations. The empirical focus is on Swedish party organizations and their performance in the electoral system, which is highly party-oriented with a vote in elections being primarily a vote for a party list. We make use of empirical materials from two earlier studies on recruitment processes.
