ABSTRACT

Political parties are both part of the state through their elected representatives in public institutions and part of civil society through their membership organizations. In Chapter 10, the editors summarize the findings presented in the various empirical chapters on the representative capacity of party members. No doubt, most old parties have lost both members and voters, while some new parties have increased their membership. This means more or less a status quo of the member/voter ratios. Members are not representative of their voters. They are more often male, older, higher-educated and with higher social status than the voters. However, the policy linkage between members and voters is still in place. The attitudes and opinions of party members are remarkably in line with those of (party) voters, albeit slightly more distinct. These observations indicate that membership decline has not affected representativeness of members to a large extent. Taken together, the findings in this book suggest that party organizations in Western democracies still do their main linkage job. Although linkage today is not perfect (especially for descriptive representation), parties perform almost equally as well as they did one or more decades ago.