This new book offers a multifaceted, backward- and forward-looking perspective on the long-standing research topic of the activities and roles of party members. It shows that despite widespread membership decline across Western democracies, members are valuable to parties, and parties are therefore prepared to take unprecedented organizational paths beyond traditional conceptions of membership.
Susan E. Scarrow investigates two interrelated and novel questions on the basis of historical, qualitative, and quantitative information gathered from 19 Western democracies. The first question pertains to the timing and causes of membership decline, while the second refers to the relationship between declining membership numbers and increasing intraparty rights of members. By way of answering these questions, Beyond Party Members makes three central claims: Firstly, the existing accounts overestimate the true nature of membership decline, because they often take the “golden age” of parties as a reference category; secondly, members are still valuable to parties today in various aspects; and thirdly, parties increasingly recognize the opportunities of the digital age to create new affiliation categories that are complementary to traditional membership. This creates “multi-speed membership parties” (p. 3).
The first claim of the book is based on an impressive, detailed, historical account of party documents (Chapter 3). It shows that throughout history, parties of the left and right have frequently changed their ideal relationship with members, guided by either normative or strategic considerations. By 1910, few parties were enrolling individual members and mass membership was even less frequent. Institutional and societal developments across Western democracies led to high enrollments in the decades immediately after World War II. However, as Scarrow argues, the peak in membership enrollment in some countries of as much as 26% of the electorate should not be the standard of any subsequent evaluation. On the basis of country-level membership figures since the 1950s, Chapter 4 argues that it is mostly supply-side factors, that is, a loss in citizens’ interest in party membership, that explains the subsequent relative decline. The great variation in country experiences might be explained by changes in definitions, institutional factors, or country-specific incentives.
The second argument of parties’ continued appreciation of members is based on quantitative data from a variety of sources. In Chapter 5, the author argues that members potentially contribute to parties in several aspects. He shows that in many areas, party members offer important and steady benefits (p. 102). While their financial contribution is not huge today, it is a steady and nontrivial source of income. Members also continue to be an important source of communication and electoral support. Finally, volunteer labor during election campaigns is still considerable among members but not exclusively so; nonenrolled party supporters seem to be offering a substantial share of voluntary party work. Scarrow therefore proposes that political parties not only should aim at retaining their existing members but should also reach out to the substantially larger group of existing supporters.
This also marks the starting point of the third argument on multispeed membership parties and their appeal to contemporary party affiliates. In Chapter 6, Scarrow introduces the concept of multispeed membership parties that acknowledges the different ways in which party affiliates can connect to their preferred party beyond traditional membership. They include the following categories: followers, light members, cybermembers, financial sustainers, and the news audience. Not only do parties offer several of these new affiliation categories, but affiliates can also easily move between them within a short period of time. Chapter 7 and 8 show that different types of affiliation are also associated with more or less exclusive benefits. In recent decades, parties have expanded the political rights of their members. These exclusive political benefits spur most excitement among existing members. So it would be only rational for parties to expand these rights even further and/or to make them more accessible to the new supporter groups. However, Scarrow also highlights the potential political conflict between increasing party access and increasing party affiliates’ rights.
The idea that parties have been changing their approaches to membership over the course of time by adjusting to normative and strategic considerations is intriguing and plausible. I am less convinced by the author’s conceptual distinctions important for this argument. Scarrow argues that parties are fed by different “narratives of legitimacy” (p. 20), and she distinguishes among seven party types associated with different sources of legitimacy and corresponding roles ascribed to members (Table 2.1). While she acknowledges a relationship of these types of parties with ideology (p. 26), the discussion and real-world examples highlight the dominant influence of ideology for the different narratives of legitimacy and the marginal impact of the other factors. Subsequent chapters further underline this by highlighting differences between “the left” and “the right” in the historical account (Chapter 3) and party family differences in members’ financial contribution (p. 117), the number of multispeed attributes (p. 147), and the degree of online accessibility (p. 150). It suggests that narratives of legitimacy may be more dependent on party ideology than the author suggests. A conceptual distinction of narratives of legitimacy based on ideology could also have motivated the discussions about differences between party families. However, it would also have limited the explanatory power of narratives of legitimacy for parties’ changing approaches to membership because ideology (to the extent that it overlaps with narratives of legitimacy) might be less subjected to change.
My second objection is related, and it is particularly relevant for the first and second argument of the book. If the narratives are “not permanent” (p. 20) yet specific to individual parties, an analytical approach that takes (in part) countries as units of observation may conceal important developments on the party level and may not sufficiently support the argument. Moving to the country level for analyses of membership figures also constrains the range of testable explanations. The proposed and tested explanations for membership decline in Chapter 4 mostly pertain to system-level changes. These alone are, however, unlikely to account for the variation in membership developments. In various places in the book, the author acknowledges intracountry variation in membership figures and also frequently illustrates this with individual examples (for example, on pp. 78 f). Yet taking individual parties as the unit of observation would have further strengthened the book’s arguments.
Overall, the arguments and methodological approaches of the book make several important contributions to the study of party membership in Western democracies. The historical account of parties’ appreciation of membership is unprecedented and of value to political scientists and political historians. The changing and multifaceted perspective on membership draws on established scholarship, such as party-change theories, institutional explanations, and country-level membership data or survey data. In other parts of the book, Scarrow develops new theories and concepts, such as the multispeed membership party, and presents entirely new data. For example, the systematic gathering of information from party Websites (N = 109) presents a highly underexplored but information-rich method of studying parties’ self-conception. Similarly, party scholarship has long lacked a cross-country longitudinal data set on leadership and policy ballots. With these theoretical and methodological contributions, Beyond Party Members provides a stimulating new perspective on the topic of party membership.
