Explaining variations in young people’s motivations to join Swedish political youth organisations

Political youth organisations are the main recruitment channel for political parties. Moreover, they educate members in campaigning, fund-raising, communication and party organisation. At the same time, they are also independent actors and important in the development of policies and as representatives of young people. Since youth organisations commonly is thought of as being more radical than their mother parties, the enrolment of young citizens may not only bring loyalists but also provide the mother party with a new generation of members that demands a say in decision-making about policy and personnel. Although these potentially contradictory roles of youth organisations are commonly mentioned in the literature, there is little empirical evidence regarding how various enrolment motives vary among youth organisation members. Against this background, this paper seeks to increase our understanding regarding why young citizens become members of political youth organisations. Further, unlike most prior research, we also set out to study what accounts for variations in enrolment motivations. Using data from a newly conducted membership survey of all Swedish parliamentary parties’ youth organisations, we study how members’ motives for enrolment vary within and across youth organisations. Further, we explore what accounts for such variations as we assess to what extent they are associated with organisational level factors such as ideology, party size, government participation and intra-party democracy as well as socioeconomic and political factors at the individual level. Our preliminary analysis suggests that while there are some variation across youth organisations, Swedish youth wings are dominated by “take-all” members, that is individuals equally motivated by ideological, social and material incentives. The “ideologists”, who primarily are engaged to change society, is a second large group whereas the share of “supporters”, those that engage solely to fulfil the goals of the mother party, are few.