Green Party members and supporters have gone to extraordinary lengths to fight an internal battle against the leadership over the selection of the party list for next years general election. Advertisements have appeared in daily newspapers across the country today that seek to pressure a change in the constitution to ensure that the leadership follows its own claims to have a democratic list selection involving the votes of members. This raises some interesting questions about the state of internal Green Party politics and that of democracy in the organization. [Read more below]
The 2008 general election campaign was both highly professionalized and bland. More than ever before, the New Zealand parties relied on professional campaign tactics and strategy, with the result that the campaign became highly meaningless for many voters, and because there was little to excite or enthuse the public, voter turnout was one of the lowest in over a hundred years. This is the overarching theme of my chapter entitled ‘Party Strategy and the 2008 Election’ which is part of the recently published book Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig). The blog post below reproduces the theory-based section of my draft chapter – which I subsequently cut out of the final version. This section explores the professionalisation of politics in New Zealand and how this is manifested in the electoral tactics and strategies of political parties. It argues that the modern professionalised nature of the political parties strongly influenced the dynamics of the 2008 campaign, the techniques utilized to sell the parties, and the ideological choices available to voters. [Read more below]
The new professionalism of the early Act party was represented most starkly by its organisational structure. The party did not just have a ‘leadership’, but also a ‘management’. The leadership obviously consisted of the public figures of Roger Douglas and Derek Quigley et al., while the management included the higher echelons of the party activists and paid organisers. The founders were attempting to create a modern highly-professionalised political party with a structure very different to the traditional ones. [Read more below]
The mass membership form of the political party is clearly extinct in New Zealand. It has been superseded by the electoral-professional form of party, which has the organisational characteristics of a low capacity for membership participation and a strong reliance on capital resources and party professionals. This series of blog posts has therefore emphasised one side of the transition to the electoral-professional form of party organisation: the decline in membership numbers. [Read more below]
Whether parties should actually want to increase their memberships is an important question. For example, it might be asked if it is really such a bad thing that political parties no longer attract members for social entertainment reasons? Nowadays the parties only draw those who are genuinely interested in belonging to a party for political reasons. The reality is that having mass memberships meant that the extra-parliamentary parties risked being flabby and almost apolitical bodies that served no real purpose other than self-legitimisation. Also, the fact that very few New Zealanders now join any of the parties could be seen as a useful verdict from voters about the state of the political parties. It might suggest that the parties have a diminished legitimacy for New Zealanders. [Read more below]
Political parties in New Zealand have been looking at ways to make the internet work for the organising of membership. This is still an evolution of organising in its infancy. [Read more below]
If New Zealand political parties ever become serious about recruiting members again, they will need to re-examine the roles that they afford members, rather than just regarding them as cannon fodder. Alternatively, should the parties want to reconcile themselves with the reality of the new low-membership, low-participation environment, they will need to restructure their parties accordingly. [Read more below]
If political parties are to increase public participation in them, it might not be via actual membership. Already many of the parties are attempting to recruit voters into the category of ‘supporter’. [Read more below]
Some commentators predicted that the introduction of MMP might reverse the decline in party membership numbers. It does not appear, however, that MMP’s promise has been delivered. [Read more below]
The shift in New Zealand towards the low-membership electoral-professional model of political parties has had particularly important consequences for the way that the public orientate towards the arena of state power. [Read more below]
There are fears that a declining membership base means that political parties are likely to become increasingly unrepresentative of New Zealand society. It can be argued that as membership declines, candidate selection is increasingly left in the hands of an unrepresentative slice of New Zealanders – or the ‘political class’. [Read more below]
Parties in New Zealand have clearly demonstrated that they can exist more than adequately without mass memberships, but the existence of the low numbers still invites the question of how well the parties function with this new arrangement. For instance, the decline of the membership numbers of New Zealand’s political parties has some important consequences for party ideology. [Read more below]
Party membership is made even more meaningless by the lack of internal democracy in the New Zealand parties. Despite supposedly democratic structures, it is the parliamentary elite of the parties that make the most important decisions. [Read more below]
Existing alongside the ‘diminishing supply’ explanations for the decline in party membership is an argument that highlights a ‘diminishing demand’ for membership on the part of party leaders. This is closely related to the shift of parties towards an electoral-professional form of organisation, which involves greater centralisation and professionalisation, all of which increasingly takes place in the parliamentary wing. In this situation, the benefits of a large membership are no longer so great, especially balanced against some of the political and financial costs that also accrue from membership. Party elites therefore have a reduced demand and capacity for involving a large membership, and subsequently expend less effort in recruiting and retaining members. [Read more below]
In recruiting members, parties face competition from alternative social activities. New Zealand political parties once fulfilled a non-political function that is now no longer required – entertainment. The huge growth in alternative social activities have reduced society’s supply of party membership. [Read more below]
The growth of the mass media has also played a key part in superseding political parties. Changes in technology mean that the media now play a strong role in mediating information between politicians and the public, where political parties used to play that role. [Read more below]
There is now a certain social stigma attached to the membership of a political party. Just as the act of seeking public office or being a politician has lost respectability, so too has the act of being part of an organisation that aids politicians and their electioneering. Added to this, the New Zealand parties – Labour and National especially – have discredited themselves in government, while in general parties and governments have shown themselves to be rather ineffective within today’s globalised capitalism. [Read more below]
The class dealignment and individualisation of society (discussed elsewhere in this blog) also influences the level of party membership in New Zealand. As time goes by, the party system is decreasingly based on class cleavages, yet the relationships between other social cleavages and political parties are also particularly weak and unstable. The relevance of parties is therefore diminished. [Read more below]
A general depoliticisation process is underway in New Zealand society, whereby people are uninterested in taking part in any political process, or even joining non-parliamentary political groups. This has clearly reduced the supply of party membership. [Read more below]
There are ideological reasons for the decline of partisanship in society. The act of joinging a political party in New Zealand is now less meaningful because there is less ideological polarisation between the parties, as well as a lesser emphasis given by the parties to their ideological components. [Read more below]
There are a number of reasons for the declining party membership numbers in New Zealand – all of which generally fall into two broad categories: (1) reduced supply of members from civil society, and (2) reduced demand for members by the parties. Supply-side arguments revolve around changes in society, such as lifestyle and declining political preferences that make membership less relevant or appealing to citizens. Demand-side arguments are related to changes in the organisation of the parties, and in particular, the shift to the electoral-professional model which has less of a demand for citizen involvement because of a reliance on party professionals and the almost pure focus on elections and the media. The following blog posts will elaborate, first on supply-side explanations, then on demand-side explanations.
The creation of the Alliance in the early 1990s was supposed to herald the resurgence of the mass membership party-type. However, the figures that the party claimed as membership were a mere fraction of what the traditional parties once claimed, and these numbers quickly melted away leaving today’s Alliance and the Progressive parties with only a handful of members and activists. [Read more below]
When the United Party was established in 1995, it appeared to be the ultimate elite-cadre type party, set up from within Parliament by MPs rather than by any strong social force. As a result it had only a very insignificant-sized membership. [Read more below]
Although the Green Party has always aspired to be a mass participatory party it has done little to bring this about. The Greens have a relatively democratic party structure, but in practice involve few activist members in steering the direction of the party. Currently the party claim to have a few thousand members. [Read more below]
The number of New Zealand First party members is especially difficult to ascertain. The high secrecy of the organisation is such that all internal party information is kept as close to the leadership as possible. Early in the party’s life NZ First claimed to have more than 10,000 members, and Winston Peters often claimed the party was the second biggest in NZ. However, as former NZ First MP and adviser Michael Laws explained, ‘Like many of Winston’s claims this one also exceeded the straitjacket of actuality’. [Read more below]
Instead of modelling itself on a mass-membership party, Act has always had as its model the electoral-professionalised design of a cadre-type party. [Read more below]
The National Party was previously the largest voluntary organisation in the country, and relative to population, was allegedly once the largest mass membership party in the Western world. [Read more below]
The New Zealand Labour Party has gone from apparently having one of the largest per capita memberships of any Labour Party in the Western world, to now possibly one of the smallest whilst in government. The story of the party’s membership is that of incredible decline. [Read more below]
There has been a very dramatic fall in party membership in New Zealand: from nearly 24% of the electorate in the 1950s to only 2% in the 1990s. This spectacular collapse began in the 1960s and, despite a recovery in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has continued to decline. This has meant that the political parties in Parliament are now low-membership, cadre-type institutions, which are more reliant on the resources of the state and on business donations. This blog post describes the aggregate decline in membership numbers. [Read more below]
The old class mass membership party type discussed in the previous blog post, has increasingly been superceded by a model of organising that is more exclusively concerned with electoral success and organised along smaller and more professional lines. The new party form is reliant on professionals, its use of new forms of communication techniques, and the strengthening of the role of leadership. There is less role in the party for members, as the party organisation is more narrowly involved in the recruitment of leaders, the legitimation of authority, and generally publicising the parliamentary leadership. [Read more below]
The establishment of the Labour Party in 1916 heralded the arrival of a new form of party organisation, the class mass party, which would eventually characterise all parties in New Zealand. [Read more below]
As in other advanced industrial democracies, the New Zealand political parties at the start of the twentieth century were typically elite-cadre type parties, in which few participated. [Read more below]
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]
