[Marxism] Some reflections on the future of party affiliation

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

It was reported in the Dutch press a few days ago that the Ministerial
Council has decided that 5 million euro extra will be distributed as
subsidies to political parties. At present the total subsidy funds for
political parties are 10 million euro, and so the total will now increase to
15 million euro.

Not just the number of seats in parliament, but also the party membership
figures will  influence the size of the additional subsidy that each party
gets. The extra money will be granted not just for party education and the
provision of information to party members, as in the past, but also for
campaigning and recruiting new members.

The Dutch government also provides finance to establish and maintain
electoral systems and political parties in developing countries, e.g. in
Africa. See e.g. http://www.ecdpm.org/.

In many European countries, the state subsidizes political parties (see e.g.
http://www.aceproject.org/main/english/ and http://www.idea.int/ for
information).

The overall trend in Europe however has been for the membership of political
parties to decline in aggregate (see further P. Mair &  I. van Biezen,
"Party Membership in Twenty European Democracies, 1980-2000"  Party
Politics, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 5-21, 2001). The main reasons are that people
could no longer identify with (traditional) political parties and no longer
believe in their efficacy.

But there are also some exceptions (in Holland, for example, the Socialist
Party- 43,000 members, roughly equal to the Liberal Party - and the Green
Left Party - 20,000 members - have consistently shown net gains of financial
members since 1998, and in the case of the SP, its membership has increased
practically every year of its existence).
http://www.rug.nl/dnpp/nieuws/index or
http://www.sp.nl/partij/leden/polpart.stm

The total number of financial members of political parties in the
Netherlands is now about 315,000 (out of a total adult population of about
13 million, i.e. a participation rate of 2.4%). In Sweden, the corresponding
figure still is somewhat higher, around 350,000, extrapolating from the
democratic audit (out of a total adult population of about 7.5 million, i.e.
a 4.6% participation rate).

In both these countries, a much larger proportion of citizens depend
directly for some or all of their personal income on state policy than in
the USA, and thus more people feel that they have a direct stake in what the
state does. However, this does not take into account the state/federal
division; many Europeans take just as much a dim view of the European
parliament as Americans do of their federal government.

In Britain, New Labour is still said to have a financial membership of about
200,000 (down from 250,000 in 2002). This represents about 0.4% of the
British adult population, but presumably it includes affiliated unions. The
British Conservative Party at present has perhaps 50-60,000 members. For
more details, see P. Seyd and P. Whiteley, "British Party Members: An
Overview". Party Politics, Vol. 10 No. 4, July 2004: pp. 355 - 366.

Jurriaan






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