This article offers an overview of levels of party membership in European democracies at the end of the first decade of the twenty‐first century and looks also at changes in these levels over time, comparing party membership today with figures from both 1980 and the late 1990s. While relying primarily on the direct and individual membership figures as reported by the parties themselves, the fit of the data with survey data is explored and it is concluded that the two perform well in terms of convergent validity. The differences between large and small democracies are examined, as well as old and new democracies, and it is found that levels of party membership are related to both the size and age of the democratic polity in question. Finally, the implications of the patterns observed in the membership data are discussed, and it is suggested that membership has now reached such a low ebb that it may no longer constitute a relevant indicator of party organisational capacity.

This article reports a comprehensive overview of new data on the levels of individual membership of political parties in twenty contemporary European democracies. Among the patterns noted in the data is the contrast between large and small democracies, as well as that between new and older democracies. However, the most striking feature to be noted is the sheer extent and consistency of membership decline through to the end of the 1990s. Not only have levels of party membership continued to decline as a proportion of the electorate, a trend which was already apparent at the end of the 1980s, there is now also compelling evidence of a major decline in the absolute numbers of party members across all the long-established European democracies. As these data clearly reveal, parties in contemporary Europe are rapidly losing their capacity to engage citizens.

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database (PPDB) project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project's first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this paper we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focussing on parties' resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine party-family and within country organizational patterns, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older datasets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: i.e., declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and 2 more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and in the forms that this democratization takes.3

In one of his last publications, Peter Mair documented how party membership had declined substantially in virtually all European democracies. As his collaborators on this piece, it seems pertinent that we take these findings as a point of departure and discuss what they mean for our understanding of party democracy. After all, the collapse of membership figures calls into question one of the central elements of our conceptualization of representative democracy, namely that it is based on voluntary political participation within political parties. All authoritative typologies of political parties consider the role of members to be one of their defining elements, although the cartel party most clearly envisages the marginalization of party members by professional party politicians. The traditional organizational allies of political parties (e.g. trade unions, organized religion) are subject to similar processes of erosion. In this article, we review the evidence of the social anchorage of political parties and discuss how political parties and party democracy can survive in an age where amateur politicians are becoming an increasingly rare species and parties are being transformed into organizational vehicles for those to whom politics is a profession rather than a vocation.

The exceptional relevance of the state in party finance in contemporary European democracies is not only of particular importance for the way in which parties organize, but also has a bearing on the normative connotations associated with the place of political parties in modern democracy. The contention of this article is that the increasingly prominent role of the state in the funding of parties should be understood in the context of, and has been legitimized by, an ideational transformation by which parties have gradually come to be seen as necessary and desirable institutions for democracy. Moreover, the direct involvement of the state in internal party affairs has contributed to a transformation of parties from the traditionally voluntary private associations towards parties as public utilities. A comparison of the practice of public funding and public control on party finance in the older liberal democracies with more recent cases of democratization shows that the newer European democracies in particular provide unequivocal testimony of such a new conception of parties and democracy.