Party membership is traditionally seen as a strong linkage mechanism between citizens and the political system. A previous analysis, however, suggests that party members do not have higher levels of political trust (Hooghe & Kern in Party Politics, forthcoming). On the other hand, those that feel ideologically closer to a political party (whether they are a member or not) do have significantly higher levels of political trust. This leads to the question whether we can indeed make a distinction between formal party membership and partisan identity. Based on our previous results, the hypothesis is that membership also has clearly instrumental goals (and thus should be associated with higher levels of political efficacy), while partisan identity rather refers to an ideological preference, that is reflected in feeling close to a political party. To ascertain the validity of this hypothesis, we will analyse the available waves of the European Social Survey, and our own Belgian Election Survey, as this also allows us to detect changes over time. We build on our previous work, that was only focused on political trust, by investigating various dependent variables (political efficacy, political trust, stability of political preferences, ideological preferences), that should allow us to develop a better understanding of what exactly distinguishes party membership from partisan identity, of ‘feeling close to a political party’, as it is often summarized in European survey research.
The relevance of this paper for the overall workshop is that it allows us to investigate whether less formal forms of partisan alignment (e.g. ‘feeling close to a political party) can be seen as a functional equivalent for the more formal party membership. If this is the case, the decline of membership rates should not be seen as a weakening of the relation between citizens and the political system.
