Party membership is usually explained either by resource based models such as the socio-economic standard model or by incentives based models focus on the inducements of party membership. The former approach stresses the influence of skills, availability and social position. The latter explains the overcome of the paradox of participation by identifying individual as well as collective benefits of joining a party. What we lack so far is a combination of these explanations as well as an application that takes differences among the members into consideration. The proposed paper focuses on young members to understand better how resources influence the importance of different types of incentives for party membership. Young members can be expected to have slightly different interests than the elder, as they are just about to make their way into the labour market and potential careers. They are also less likely to join a party out of traditional class or milieu belongings and could be true "ideologically convicted” members.
Based on a data set from a survey among young party members in the German Social Democratic Party (N=4000) I argue that these young members differ greatly regarding the incentives they respond to. I will present a latent class analysis based typology of party members. The three class model shows a distinct group seeking all kind of incentives while another has strong ideological motivations for membership and a third group is rather reluctant to incentives as such. Further analysis shows that these groups are very different regarding their socio-economic backgrounds. This difference between different members has important impact on the opportunities for shrinking and aging parties to address their young members.
