Explaining the Development of Aggregate German Party Membership

Abstract

This article will first introduce a model that explains the development of aggregate party membership on the basis of individuals’ decisions. Important factors explaining the decision to join a party will be analysed in turn. These are incentives and restraints to join the party as well as possible alternatives of action. The second part of the article will illustrate how the membership of relevant German parties developed between 1945 and 2016, whereas the third part will analyse various explanations for this development according to the presented model.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Oskar Niedermayer was professor of political science at the Institute of Political Science of the Free University of Berlin, managing director of the Otto-Stammer-Center for Political Sociology and head of the Working Group on Party Research of the German Political Science Association. He is retired since October 2017. His research interests focus on political parties, electoral behaviour and political orientations and he is the author of numerous articles and books on these topics.

Notes

1. For the transfer of this theory to the analysis of party memberships, see Gabriel and Niedermayer (2002).

2. For an earlier version of this classification, see Niedermayer (1989). For an alternative classification, see the general incentives-model of Seyd and Whiteley (1992).

3. We will not deal with the ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ here, a party founded in 2013, which entered the German Bundestag for the first time in 2017. The party had 26,409 members at the end of 2016.

4. All those living in Germany and aged 14 or more can join the SPD or the Linkspartei. The age qualification for the CDU, CSU and FDP is 16 years, whereas the Greens have no age qualification in their statute. More important for the different population targeted for recruitment is the fact, that the CDU can recruit its members only outside of Bavaria and the CSU only in Bavaria.

5. CSU Secretary General Streibel in a letter of December 1969 (see, Gnad 2005, 555).

6. As Laux (2011, 64–66) recently found, these incentives to join a party rank first among members.

7. On the concepts of “low-intensity” and “high-intensity participation” see Whiteley and Seyd (2002).

8. On the development of the FDP and the other German parties after the general election of 2009, see Niedermayer (2012).

9. Like, e.g. the so-called Schulz-hype at the beginning of 2017, when 15,000 new members joined the SPD within three months.