Project

Survey at party members CD&V and Groen

Code
HGA31504113
Duration
01 January 2013 → 31 December 2015
Funding
Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Research disciplines
  • Social sciences
    • Other economics and business
    • Citizenship, immigration and political inequality
    • International and comparative politics
    • Multilevel governance
    • National politics
    • Political behaviour
    • Political organisations and institutions
    • Political theory and methodology
    • Public administration
    • Other political science
Keywords
Groen surveys CD&V
 
Project description

Membership of political parties has been shrinking, but at the same time party members are

granted increased powers in the party and citizens have increasingly become involved in

alternative decision-making channels independent from parties. All these trends make it

important to examine party members. As parties shrink and participation procedures are

introduced, do parties attract a changed mixture of members, possibly with different motives

to join and with different participation habits than before? And what about participation

running independently from parties: are people fleeing from parties in great numbers in order

to participate more individually, or are they combining party membership with individual

participation?

These questions will be studied as such, but also in comparison with other recently conducted

surveys in Belgian parties (N-VA and OpenVLD; sp.a; PS and CDH). As such, the surveys

of the current proposal (in combination with other recent surveys) allow us to sketch an

almost complete picture of party membership in Flanders/Belgium.

There are two main reasons why it is interesting to hold a party member survey now: the last

decade, Belgian parties have increasingly lost more members (Quintelier & Hooghe, 20 I 0)

and possible long term effects of internal elections and citizen participation can only now be

evaluated to the full extent.