The Role(s) of Members in Parties and Groups in Four European Democracies

Voluntary membership organizations – parties, interest groups or service-oriented organizations alike – bring together citizens, groups or organizations to jointly pursue shared interests. Their collective nature and the continuous possibility of members leaving, however, does not mean that members are necessarily central to how these organizations operate. To understand the diverse roles members can play in voluntary organizations, we distinguish two notions of member activism: ‘member influence’ as members exercising control over core organizational decisions and ‘member involvement’ as a resource (of information or organizational support) that the organization can profit from without elites giving up control. We derive two sets of hypotheses from the two notions and test them on the basis of new data generated by four recently completed population surveys in the UK, Norway, Germany and Switzerland, each of them covering currently active regionally and nationally relevant parties and groups. First statistical analyses show that no factor has a robust effect on both membership involvement and influence. While organizational professionalization (measured in number of paid staff) has a significant negative effect on influence, confirming a trade-off between professionalization and member influence, it has no implications for involvement. Member involvement, in contrast, is driven by number of volunteers and recent reforms to enhance members’ ability to engage with the organization, none of which have an effect on member influence in turn.