engleski

Divergent levels of party membership in the Post- Yugoslav and CEE democracies

A well-documented trend of party membership decline in Western Europe in the last twenty years has not been followed by similarly systematic account of the party membership in post-communist countries, especially with regard to South-Eastern Europe. However, according to the existing data), on the first glance there is a big gap in party membership figures between Central-Eastern European countries, on the one hand, where parties show even lower levels of membership than in Western Europe, and post- Yugoslav countries, on the other hand, where parties report much higher number of members than in Western Europe. Prior to any interpretative inquire, one should exclude a possibility that the differences could result from parties false reporting on membership figures, having in mind the state of the membership records in the region, the lack of frequent updating, but also parties’ intentions to “build up” their support in the public. The paper is organized around the on- going research project that in the first phase has the goal to ensure reliability of the collected data. This should be achieved by two means: 1) by comparing official data reported by parties with the data from public opinion polls containing the question on party membership and 2) by mail-survey of organizational secretaries of parties in Central and South Eastern European countries on membership, estimation of active membership, ways in which the data are collected and stored, levels and types of membership fees, relative total income from membership fees, etc. The research covers 128 parties from 17 countries with an attempt to use the data to establish corrective adjustments and estimate more real levels of party membership for each party. If corrected numbers of members still show significant differences between Central and South Eastern Europe, in the second phase we shall try to explain divergent levels in party membership by differences in participatory political culture steaming from a) different types of socialism, b) nationalistic movements in 1990s and c) clientelistic politics.

party membership ; objective figures ; subjective figures ; corrective adjustments ; Central and Eastern Europe

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