Combining the Best of Both Worlds? Party Members and Citizens’ Initiatives in Belgium

Political parties, often seen as an informal linkage between formally separated components of the political system (e.g. between citizens and government or between parliament and executive government) are thought to be in crisis the last few decades. Especially the civil functions (communication to and with the citizen, integration and mobilization of the citizen, articulation of citizens’ interests) 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 and trade union members (e.g. Van Biezen et al, 2012). These tendencies put the aforementioned 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, amongst others in order to realize projects in their own neighbourhood. These so-called ‘citizen initiatives’ are in general not organized by the political elite nor by political parties (Bakker et al, 2012), and unlike participation in traditional, ‘pillarized’ organisations (such as trade unions), there are no affiliations between these neighbourhood initiatives and political parties. Therefore, party membership is often contrasted to these new forms of participation (Dalton, 2013 ; Hooghe & Mariën, 2012). In this paper, we question this contrast and investigate to what extent party members also engage in citizen initiatives, and which factors at the individual level (dissatisfaction with membership, post-materialistic values, resources, etc.) and the party level (ideology, party history, etc.) could explain their participation behaviour. 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 people who are not formally affiliated to political parties. In order to conduct this analysis, we rely on data gathered in recent party member surveys in five Belgian parties (N = 3,500).