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The electoral impact of grassroots activity in the 2012 local elections in Flanders

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Abstract

Does grassroots party activity win parties votes? The effect of party organization on performance is one of the most enduring debates about political parties. The conventional wisdom regarding the growing irrelevance of grassroots activity in the age of television has been increasingly challenged by studies of constituency parties’ efforts to mobilize likely supporters on election day. Few studies, however, have looked at the electoral impact of grassroots activity outside plurality systems. In particular, we present a most intriguing case study – one where voting is compulsory and parties’ efforts at mobilization likely superfluous. Using new and detailed data on grassroots party activity in Flanders, we demonstrate that grassroots activity has a positive and significant effect on parties’ vote share in the 2012 local elections, even after controlling for national tides and performance in the previous election. Alternative modelling strategies and operationalizations are testament to the robustness of these findings.

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Notes

  1. The analyses focus on Flanders, the Dutch-speaking community in the north of Belgium. Earlier, more preliminary, analyses suggest that conclusions for the French-speaking community in the south are not different. But extremely low response rates (9.3 per cent) for the largest party, PS, raised critical concerns over non-response bias and therefore the French-speaking community in Brussels and Wallonia was left out of the study (Deschouwer et al, 2013, p. 16).

  2. Non-member supporters increasingly complement and supplement member activity in this regard (Fisher et al, 2014).

  3. The Imperiali divisor is a highest average method of seat allocation, dividing votes by 2, 3, 4 and so on.

  4. Wille and Deschouwer (2007) make a similar observation for the 1976–2006 period, counting only national parties competing under the national party name.

  5. For the 2006 elections the proportion of seats was used. That is, lists that presented a joint list in the previous election, but not in 2012, were allotted a proportion of seats, in accordance with the number of incumbents on each of the constituent lists. While we cannot disentangle the votes of joint lists, we can attribute the seats (and incumbents) – provided they stand in this election. Using the proportion of seats parties won in 2012, rather than their vote share, does not alter our findings.

  6. Using OLS regression instead, we find a similar positive and significant effect of grassroots activity, in terms of both intensity and variety, on their electoral performance. Fractional regression provides an even more conservative test. This modelling strategy takes into account that values of the dependent variable, as a proportion of the vote, are truncated between 0 and 1 by using the logit transformation of the dependent variable. Again the key findings are robust.

  7. The distance in time between the answer categories is not equal, however. Replicating the analysis with an adjusted scale that takes into account the differences between the time frequencies, (1) at least once a week, (0.50) at least once a fortnight, (0.23) at least once a month, (0.08) at least once every 3 months, (0.04) at least once every 6 months, (0.02) at least once a year and (0) less than once a year, does not alter the conclusions.

  8. One alternative operationalization is to look at the total number of activities in a year (counting weekly activities as 52 activities in a year, fortnightly as 26 activities in a year and so on). Another is to use the factor loadings from the factor analysis, taking into account the mean frequency of all activities. Factor analysis only uses the observations that have no missing values on the 12 activities, however. This reduces the number of cases from 767 to 618, which in turn hinders comparison to the base model. In that case it would have been impossible to rule out whether a different result had been due to the different composition of the ‘sample’ or to the alternative measurement of local branches’ level of activity. To sidestep the problem of item non-response multiple imputation of missing values was used. All observed values were used to obtain best estimations of non-observed values, on the basis of the EM inter-items covariance matrix (using mi in stata). Correlations between the factor analyses with and without imputed values are almost perfect. Models with and without imputed missing values come to similar conclusions. In all cases grassroots activity has a positive and significant effect on parties’ vote share.

  9. Unfortunately, the 2006 survey did not ask respondents for the frequency with which specific activities had been organized in the preceding term, presenting them instead with a binary choice as to whether or not they had organized the activities in the previous year (see Buelens et al, 2008).

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge BELSPO for funding the PARTIREP ‘Participation and Representation in Modern Democracies’ international study.

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  1. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 5, Brussels, 1050, Belgium

    Audrey André & Sam Depauw

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  1. Audrey André
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Correspondence to Audrey André.

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This article constitutes a thoroughly revised and updated version of ‘De kracht van de lokale afdelingen’ (André and Depauw, 2013).

Appendix

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Table A1

Table A1 How often does your local branch organize each of these activities (outside the electoral campaign)?
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André, A., Depauw, S. The electoral impact of grassroots activity in the 2012 local elections in Flanders. Acta Polit 51, 131–152 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2014.39

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