CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Lechhab, Magdalena |
|---|---|
| Title | Ciao bella, ciao: Why are parties losing members |
| Summary | While research on party membership evolves around who joins a party and why, we do not know why party members are leaving parties. Although parties continue to lose members, there are no distinct theories about party disengagement. This thesis tries to fill that gap by establishing a theory of party disengagement using narrative interviews with 10 ex-members of German and Austrian social-democratic parties. The outcome of this inductive theory building approach was that first, leaving a party is a rather long process and, secondly, that structural and ideological intraparty factors are the underlying causes for the party exit. While a certain trigger event can eventually spark the concrete exit, members are disengaging because of internal issues that then increase the feeling of not having efficacy. However, the social environment can extend the leaving process. In the second part of the thesis, I conducted a descriptive analysis by combining the MAPP and PPDB datasets to see if the structural intraparty factors that were identified as exit reasons can explain the decline of party membership numbers. Membership decline does not affect all parties, but overall, we can see that parties that allow for intra-party policy ballots perform better than those who do not. Allowing all members to vote for the party leader, however, does not seem to be particularly beneficial. Finally, party family plays a role: while low hierarchies, more intra-party democracy and more power for factions benefit social-democratic parties, and to some extend ecological and liberal parties, the pattern is reversed for conservative and Christian-democratic parties. |
| Supervisor | Schneider, Carsten Q. |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/lechhab_magdalena.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University