The German Party Membership Study 2017: Party Memberships in Change

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Markus Klein; Professor Dr. Christoph Strünck, since 2/2018
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 318815579

Following on from the Potsdam Party Membership Study 1998 and the German Party Membership Study 2009, the German Party Membership Study 2017 makes an important contribution to a long-term social documentation of German party membership. The postal surveys of representative samples of members of the CDU, the CSU, the SPD, Die Linke, the Greens and the FDP enable a description of changes in German party membership over a period of almost two decades. They enable processes of change to be studied with respect to the sociostructural, psychographic and behavioural attributes of party members. The German Party Membership Study 2017 thus provides descriptive information that is of enormous significance both to academic research into political parties and to politics in general as well as the political work of particular parties. The German Party Membership Study 2017 also enables an empirical analysis of key scholarly interpretations regarding changes in the membership of German parties. These interpretations hypothesise that changes in membership occur as a result of the alternation of generations. However, it is only possible to analyse these kinds of generational dynamics using sophisticated age-period-cohort models, a meaningful assessment of which is possible only with data that has been collected at a minimum of three sufficiently distant points in time. Hence, one key goal of the German Party Membership Study 2017 is to enable an analysis of age-, period- and cohort-specific effects of changes in German party membership. The German Party Membership Study 2017 also empirically analyses determinants of people joining and leaving parties. Alongside the deaths of party members, this is a key factor in the changing composition of German party membership. An understanding of the mechanisms behind decisions to join or leave a party are therefore of fundamental importance for understanding changes in membership. In order to be able to empirically analyse these decisions, former and current party members as well as individuals who have never been a member of a political party are interviewed in a disproportionally stratified population-based telephone survey. The German Party Membership Study 2017 proceeds on the basis of the normative premise that political parties make an indispensable and irreplaceable contribution to the functioning of modern representative democracies. Against this background, the overarching aim of the project is to study the effects of changes in membership on the functioning of German parties and their ability to ensure social integration, and thereby identify problems and propose solutions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Tim Spier, until 2/2018 (†)