-
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
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.