Parties with Limited Resources? On the Social Structure of the Membership of Small and Marginal Parties

ABSTRACT

Small and marginal parties (SMPs) are a constant feature of the party landscape in Germany’s political system. Some of these parties have failed to enter parliament for a long time, with many already dissolving soon after they were founded. One reason for this lack of political clout may be a lower level of resources at the individual level. Using data from the Forsa-Bus, we show that the socioeconomic makeup of members of SMPs differs from that of members of large parties. SMP members take up the middle ground between members of large parties and non-members, which means that these parties encourage the political participation of a more diverse socioeconomical group. This leads to a broader public being involved in the democratic process of elections than initially anticipated.

KEYWORDS:

• party members
• small parties
• marginal parties
• socioeconomic standard model

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The data used are the membership data provided by the parties themselves. These are as accurate as data from the parties always is. However, there is no reason to believe that the membership data here is exaggerated.

2 Scarrow and Gezgor (2010), while also mainly reporting a state of stability, describe a declining discrepancy between party members and the general population in terms of religiosity and trade union affiliation. The very first entry in their table on the effect of religiosity makes it clear how they arrive at this assessment and why this might be misleading. In Belgium, 26% of the population and 18% of party members were religious in the 1990s, compared to 15% and 10% respectively in the 2000s. From their point of view, the gap has narrowed because the percentage difference has fallen from 8 to 5 percentage points. Alternatively, one might say that the proportion of religious people was at first 44% higher and later 50% higher among party members than in the population. It is therefore a question of relative and absolute changes that determines the assessment. If the frequency of a characteristic in society falls rapidly, e.g. religiosity and trade union membership, it is to be expected to see a smaller percentage point difference between members and the population than before.

3 We do not intend to diminish the broader considerations on the causal relationships that Verba et al. (1972: 123-248) already included in the original work in ‘Part II’ of their classic. After all, this weakness of their approach has already been pointed out by the authors themselves (Brady et al., 1995, p. 272; Verba et al., 1995, p. 280).

4 In van den Boom's interviews with SMP representatives, they repeatedly mentioned that members are often highly motivated when they join, but quickly leave disappointed because of the party's limited influence (van den Boom, 1999, pp. 255–256).

5 ÖDP stands for ‘Ökologisch-Demokratische Partei’ (Ecological Democratic Party).

6 Unfortunately, this means that we cannot provide a list of included parties. While voting intentions for SMPs are also generally documented in aggregate form, here, at least all relevant far right parties are listed separately. These are the NPD, the DVU and the Republikaner in the period under study. Around 7.5% of SMP-members declared their intention to vote for one of these parties in the national parliamentary elections. So-called losers of modernisation tend to support radical right-wing parties. For Germany, this has been shown repeatedly, most recently with the AfD after it increasingly positioned itself further to the right (Klein et al., 2022). It is therefore not surprising that this group of respondents has a lower socio-economic status than the other SMP-members; it is comparable to the level of non-members and above the level of right-wing voters who are no party members. At the same time, excluding them from the comparisons between SMPs and established parties does not change the presented patterns. It is therefore by no means the case that this party family is the reason for the differences between the memberships of SMPs and established parties. Differences within the group of SMPs are to be expected, just as there are differences in the average socio-economic status of members of established parties - for example the proportion of highly educated people in the Left and Green party memberships differs by 20 percentage points (Klein et al., 2019, p. 89). Not being represented in parliament is just one of several party characteristics that might impact the sociodemographic composition of a party’s membership. Unfortunately, the same reasons as mentioned above apply to the membership fees. Therefore, we can only show the general trend of SMPs having lower fees than parliamentary parties but are unable to differentiate within the SMP group.

7 Among the few survey projects that include questions on party membership in Germany, there are only two other data sets with at least a notable number of SMP members surveyed: These are the telephone surveys of the German Party Membership Survey (2009, 2017) with 55 SMP and the European Social Survey (2002–2010) with 28 SMP-members. As a robustness check, we also ran our analyses using these data, which yielded results consistent with the patterns we show below for the Forsa-Bus (results available upon request from the authors). The only other national level data sets being used for research on party membership in Germany are the ALLBUS 2008 and 2018 (e.g. Borucki et al., 2021). Here, members are not asked which party they belong to, not allowing us to differentiate between different types of party members. In addition to that, members of one specific marginal party, the Ökologisch-Demokratische Partei, were interviewed (Biehl & Kranenpohl, 2011).

8 Because of these bivariate analyses, we do not report univariate distributions separately. During the period under study, only up to 3% of the German electorate were party members. Hence, in the corresponding table 2, the values given for non-members almost equal the proportions in the whole population, i.e. the univariate distribution.

9 For example, support for green parties is associated with post-materialism (Grant and Tilley, 2019), which flourishes when material needs are already met. At the other end of the spectrum, economically less well-off losers of modernisation are more likely to favour far-right parties (Spier, 2010). For established parties, the expected socioeconomic difference between the memberships of these two party families has been shown (Heidar et al., 2019b), so the general pattern is probably the same for SMP parties with comparable programmes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jan-Eric Bartels

Jan-Eric Bartels is a post-doctoral free researcher, formerly based at the Chair for German Politics, based in the Department of Political Sciences, University of Göttingen. His interests include small and marginal parties, party competition and quantitative content analysis. E-mail: [email protected]

Frederik Springer

Frederik Springer was a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, Leibniz University Hannover. His research focuses on party members, electoral systems and voting behaviour.