“Going Local": The Local Dimension of Party Membership Recruitment Strategies in Belgium

While the decline of national party membership levels in Europe is a well-documented phenomenon (Van Biezen et al. 2012), little is known on how parties organize at a subnational level to recruit members. Much of the literature on party membership has focused on political parties conceived as rational unitary actors (Scarrow, 1994). Yet, political parties are evolving in increasingly multi-layered or multi-level systems (Deschouwer, 2003) with interactions between the different electoral arenas (Hooghe and Marks, 2003; Fabre, 2010). Recent studies in Canada have shown the importance of local party branches organizations to mobilize members and integrate with the party at national level (Pruysers, 2018; Carty and Eagles, 2005). However, there is still little empirical evidence on the impact of local party recruitment strategies on membership level and characteristics. Relying on the 2018 Belgian Local Chair Survey, this paper suggests to investigate the link between local branch affiliation procedures, local contextual variables and membership levels and type.