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 Open VLD: CD&V and Groen; 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 pary memeber survey now: the last decade, Belgian parties have increasingly lost more members (Quintelier & Hooghe, 2010) and possible long term effects of internal elections and citizen participation can only now be evaluated to the full extent.