One of the most obvious ways in which New Zealand political parties appear to be in decline is in their inability to recruit and retain members. This phenomenon is part of a wider change: the party organisations have been shifting from class-based mass membership parties to small professional electoral-focused parties. [read more below]
In terms of their structures and operations the Labour and National parties now have little resemblance to their original forms or even what they looked like in the early 1980s. Furthermore, the new political parties spawned in the 1990s, such as New Zealand First, the Green Party, Act and United Future started life with a very different organisational form to that of traditional political parties. All of these organisations are characterised by centralisation, professionalisation, a concentration of power in their parliamentary wings, weak relationships with societal organisations, and – most significantly – very small memberships.
Many theorists view membership numbers as an indicator of the organised strength of political parties and the depth of their societal connections. Party scholars frequently cite decreasing party membership and partisanship as evidence that political parties are declining (See: Dalton, Flanagan, and Beck (1984), Sainsbury (1985), Katz (1987), and Messina (1995). See also: Bean (1998), who argues,
Membership of a political party is arguably the most fundamental of the various links that tie voters to parties. Without at least some branch members to give it an organisational presence within the electorate, no democratic political party could survive. As a result, changes in party membership numbers are regarded as a key indicator of whether parties are declining in western democracies (p.108).
A number of writers have noted that parties throughout advanced industrial democracies have been facing a membership decline since the 1960s – in both absolute and relative terms (Katz 1987; Widfeldt 1992). New Zealand is regarded as having had the greatest decline in the OECD. Between the 1950s and 1990s New Zealand party membership as a proportion of the electorate fell, according to Susan Scarrow, from 23.8% to only 2.1% – a decline of 21.7 percentage points. Other notable OECD declines involved percentage point declines of 5.9 in France, 8.1 in the United Kingdom, 10.7 in Italy, 12.6 in Denmark, and 16.3 in Sweden (Scarrow, 2000: p.90). Of the 16 OECD countries studied by Susan Scarrow, New Zealand had the third lowest membership ratio. [Compared to New Zealand’s 2.1% in the 1990s, Australia and France had 1.5%, the UK 1.9, Germany 3.2, Switzerland 8.7, Finland 10.5, and Austria 17.1.]
That New Zealand constitutes a particularly advanced case of party membership decline can be seen in the fact that whereas the National and Labour parties were once able to claim branch memberships of 250,000 and 80,000 respectively, today National only has about 20,000, and Labour about 10,000 members. Likewise, the newer parties of New Zealand First, the Greens, Act, United Future and the Maori Party probably only have about 15,000 members between them. It seems that fewer New Zealanders belong to political parties today than at any time since the establishment of the two-party system in the 1930s.
This series of blog posts argues that this membership decline – together with the other organisational changes – reflects a significant evolution from the class-based mass party model of organising to that of the electoral-professional type, a model of party that is dominated by party professionals and is highly focused on the search for electoral success, rather than the pursuit and promotion of political ideals. This shift represents a decline in the linkage between parties and civil society. The modern party structures now play a weak role in connecting society to the arenas of state power, thus reducing the extent to which parties function as outlets for, and stimulants to, civic participation. In this situation, parties are failing as community-based agents of political socialisation, mobilisation and integration. Instead party professionals now mediate the divide between state and society, but are unable to fulfil the same functions as the class mass party. The fact that these political organisations no longer play the same role in the functioning of democracy that they did for most of the twentieth century therefore leads to suggestions of decline. By this, commentators and theorists do not necessarily mean that parties are disappearing or face extinction, but that they are seen to fail in many of their traditional functions and are becoming increasingly marginalised.
Such a view has become increasingly popular within the study of political parties, with various theorists concentrating on different features of this decline. The demise has been a central feature of such diagnoses of
organizational ‘contagion from the right’ (Epstein 1980: 257-60), the spread of the ‘catch-all party’ (Kirchheimer 1966), the rise of the ‘rational-efficient’ party organization (Wright 1971), the advent of the ‘electoral-professional party’ (Panebianco 1988), party ‘cartelization’ (Katz and Mair 1995), the ‘crisis of the mass parties’, and even ‘party failure’ (Lawson and Merkl 1988) (Scarrow, 2000: p.82).
This series therefore takes up the focus on party decline and examines the New Zealand parties as membership-based organisations, asking how relevant the mass party model is to the modern party system and how the shift to new organisational forms contributes to decline. A focus on this shift is important because it seems to be both a cause and consequence of the weakening of linkage between citizens and the state (Scarrow, 2000: p.84). It suggests that the New Zealand parties are now characterised more by the electoral-professional party model, and that an understanding of this model can explain much about the ideological erosion in contemporary politics.
The next few posts will look at the evolution of party types over the last century in New Zealand. Many party theorists detail a number of stages that the Western parliamentary party institution has evolved through during the twentieth century. Despite some variation, there is a general consensus that at the start of the century an elite-cadre type of party prevailed, which was then replaced by the mass party in the 1930s, which was superseded from the 1960s onwards by the ‘catch-all’ or electoral-professional type. The next few posts therefore outline these ideal types and discuss how they relate to New Zealand political development.
After this, posts will look at the membership history and current details of the individual political parties. Then I hope to propose some explanations for the decline in party membership in New Zealand. And finally, the last posts will explore some of the implications of the low levels of party membership, arguing that it contributes to the erosion of ideology. These posts will also discuss the relationship between party membership and the shift to MMP, and outlines some future possibilities for membership in New Zealand.
[This series of blog posts is to be updated – any feedback or further information is very welcome]