Party members & organisation

Populist radical right (PRR) parties have long been characterised as ‘men’s parties’ due to the overrepresentation of men among their voters and grassroots members. While the gender gap among voters has been extensively investigated, little is known about the extent to which women participate at the grassroots of these parties. My book examines this by asking: How does gender shape the experience of PRR party membership? To do so, it looks both at the ‘supply-side’ of PRR party membership, assessing whether women and men differ in their motivations for joining, motivations for staying, and participation in party activities; and the ‘demand-side’, exploring if PRR parties adopt distinct recruitment and retention strategies for women and men. I focus on three PRR parties which have had profound influence on the politics and societies of their countries: the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the League in Italy, and the Sweden Democrats. The book draws on a vast collection of original qualitative and quantitative data which includes interviews with over 100 party members and officials from the three parties, in addition to membership surveys of thousands of members of the League and the Sweden Democrats. Arguing that women PRR grassroots members play a central role in the organisational development, electoral expansion and growing normalisation of the populist radical right, this volume casts light on one of the defining political phenomena of our century.

Many of today’s most prominent populist radical right (PRR) leaders in Europe came through their party’s youth wings. Yet we know little about these organisations and how they and their members support their parties. This book, which is not only the first to examine PRR youth wings but is the first in English to look at youth wings of any ideological type, focuses on their structures and agents. Specifically, it considers their organisational features, their relationships with the senior party, their international networks, and their leaders and grassroots members. Covering 10 PRR youth wings from across Europe, and based on extensive interviews, survey data, and document analysis, it finds that youth wings are not merely peripheral future-oriented entities but are central and influential components of their parties in the here and now. The book thus offers a unique window on how youth wings are both supporting the PRR today and helping build the PRR of tomorrow.

Young people increasingly withdraw from party politics. However, some still join parties because they believe they can influence them to achieve change. We examine this personal efficacy among contemporary youth wing members and ask: what are the individual and party-level factors that influence their personal efficacy? To do so, we combine the “Political Party Database Base” with the largest original survey of youth wing members conducted, covering ~3,600 members of twelve party youth wings in six democracies. We find that young people who are more active are more efficacious and that efficacy drops after joining but eventually increases for members that stay longer. We also find that greater opportunities for the youth wing to be heard by its party fosters more efficacious youth wing members. Our results show that parties which incentivise participation and integrate their youth wings into senior party increase their members’ personal efficacy and nurtures democratic citizens.

Political parties expect their youth wings to recruit and socialize young members into the norms and values of the senior party. However, exposure to youth wings may not necessarily go hand-in-hand with greater attachment to the senior party. This study examines whether youth wings nurture the members parties want using survey data from over 5,000 members of 12 youth wings in six countries. We assess whether length and degree of participation in youth wings are associated with greater ideological alignment and long-term party engagement. The results show that active members are somewhat more ideologically aligned and inclined to remain in the senior party, while passive members display the opposite trend. However, length of membership is associated with reduced aspirations among all for intra-party and public office. Our findings thus indicate that the added value of youth wings as future-oriented socialization vehicles for parties is less than generally assumed.

Party youth wings are a vital pipeline to power in parliamentary democracies, but have been overlooked by gender and politics scholars. We investigate the political socialization that youth wings offer their women members, focusing on gendered trends as regards two key political attitudes. We ask: Do women and men in youth wings differ in their acquisition of personal efficacy and electoral ambition? Using original survey data from over 3,100 youth wing members in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden, we find that women are more likely than men to report increased desire to influence party policy and stand as candidates – the latter especially in center-right youth wings. Moreover, the more exposed members are to the youth wing, the larger the gender gaps in the acquisition of efficacy and ambition. Our results suggest that, insofar as women’s political socialization is concerned, youth wings can be forces of renovation within their parties.

Parties and citizens are said to have mutually withdrawn from their zones of engagement towards the end of the twentieth century. However, the information provided by parties, which has been used to theorize about party organizational change, presents a number of issues. First, it is acknowledged by researchers to often be unreliable. Second, it largely concerns the “demand” side of the party on the ground, that is, grassroots memberships, rather than the “supply” side: local branches. Third, since it consists of national-level data, it does not tell us about the geography of the party on the ground’s alleged fall. In this paper, we address these issues by mapping the location of party branches over time using an unobtrusive method that does not rely on data from the parties. Specifically, we use phone directories to track local branches of the three electorally strongest parties in Italy and Sweden between 1960 and the early 2000s. Our analysis reveals that the number of what we call “resourced branches” (with a telephone) in both countries grew until the second half of the 1980s, before falling in the 1990s. It also shows though that these national-level results mask divergent centre-periphery and rural-urban trends. Our findings shed light on the extent to which the mutual disengagement of people and parties on the ground was indeed mutual and how this disengagement had specific geographical characteristics.

Do young women and men vary in their reasons for joining political parties, and if so, why? To investigate this, we theorize the following: first, women will be more attracted by social incentives and men by material ones; second, before signing up, women will have more party-affiliated personal ties (i.e. family and friends) than men; and third, these ties will mediate the gender gap in incentives. Drawing on original survey data from over 3,400 party youth wing members of the main center-left and center-right parties in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy and Spain, we find strong support for our argument. Our results show that, already in this early but crucial part of the pipeline to power, the incentives for getting involved in political parties are gendered. Notably, the young women who join are more likely to have party-affiliated personal ties than men, indicating that such resources are particularly valuable to them in overcoming the disadvantages they face when entering politics. If parties are interested in recruiting more young women, they should therefore emphasize the social rewards of membership in their recruitment campaigns.