Still Connected? Attitudinal Representativeness of German Party Memberships

Abstract

In modern representative democracies political parties are the main institutions responsible for providing linkage between citizens and the state. One way to do this is through organizational linkage mechanisms, especially the representation of a party’s voters through the party membership. This paper tries to describe the attitudinal representativeness of German party memberships in terms of left-right positions using data from two party membership studies from 1998 and 2009. In a second step, the determinants of divergent attitudes of party members from the position of the parties’ voters are analyzed on an individual level, testing four possible explanations for this.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. We refrained from any corrections we could have made by comparing the sample with data the parties could have provided on their whole membership because we have no information on the recency and accuracy of the data the parties have on their members, and because even if the parties were able to provide sufficient data, it would most probably be restricted to information about age and gender and not include other relevant characteristics.

2. This assumption is challenged by a study by Widfeldt (1995, 170–171), who found no particular correlation between a party’s degree of social representativeness and it attitudinal representativness, and vice versa.

3. Similar, but with different names for the party types.

4. The operationalisation used here was first employed by Klein (2006).

5. Ironically, this would mean that in the era of mass mobilization, political parties undermined their own future representativeness by attracting citizens which were not necessarily politically interested.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [GZ AL 171/4-1,KL 1385/1-1].