Do new participatory rights attract more party members? Evidence from Germany

Abstract

Political parties in advanced democracies have slowly but steadily lost members over the last decades. In response to such decline, a common argument is that parties aim to revitalize their internal life by introducing new participatory mechanisms for rank-and-file members. Introducing party primaries or party plebiscites should increase the attractiveness of membership and thus attract new members in aggregate. Although this argument is commonly present in the literature, we need a systematic empirical comparison. To test this argument, this article exploits the federal structure of German political parties and the different timing in introducing new participatory rights. The results of a series of fixed effects regressions, using data from the CDU/CSU and SPD between 1980 and 2020, find that new primaries have an essentially null influence on membership levels while plebiscites appear to reduce the number of members leaving the party.