Social and Ideological Representativeness: a Comparison of Political Party Members and Supporters in Finland.

Political party members are a significant group in driving both party values and future changes. Therefore, source of party representativeness hold significance in assessing the party landscape in a national setting. It has been suggested that traditional parties are losing their legitimacy to act as a central root between citizens and state decision makers due to the weakening link between supporters, members and party elites. In this study, we provide a new frame of reference for understanding intra-party dynamics by analyzing party members’ representativeness with respect to party supporters at the socioeconomic index and ideological levels in terms of attitudes towards income equality. The analysis is based on a unique member-based survey of Finland’s six major political parties (N=12, 427) which is combined with supporter data derived from nationally representative survey. In assessing supporters, members and active members, the clearest general differences were found between supporters’ and members’ social status as active members were clearly in higher social positions. However, there is wider gap between parties when comparing supporters than members in terms of social status. At the same time, findings showed political opinions on income equality, immigration and environmental threats are still key differences between certain parties at the different levels of party stratum. Together these findings support the hypotheses about the party members as reinforcing factors regarding the traditional party cleavages. However, findings provide also an interesting landscape of the last decade’s changes in the Finnish environment. The new parties, namely the Finns and the Greens, have first of all separated from the traditional left-right spectrum and in the second place, their members are ideologically very close to the their supporters.