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Many parties have updated their recruitment strategies and offer softer routes for joining their ranks. In some parties, registered sympathizers are given virtually the same rights as traditional members with substantially lower costs. This begs the question, why would somebody take the further step of joining such parties as full members rather than sympathizers? This article analyzes this question by using membership surveys from three left-wing Spanish parties. As such, it explores the usefulness of the general incentives model (GIM) for explaining the decisions of these two groups of affiliates. We find that full members and sympathizers differ in the motives they have to join the party and in their evaluations of the diverse types of incentives included in the GIM. Candidate selection incentives seem particularly important for sympathizers, whereas selective outcome incentives, selective process benefits, collective outcome benefits and altruistic motivations play a more significant role for members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a systematic assessment of various methods to position political parties on immigration, a policy domain that does not necessarily overlap with left–right and is characterized by varying salience and issue complexity. Manual and automated coding methods drawing on 283 party manifestos are compared – manual sentence-by-sentence coding using a conventional codebook, manual coding using checklists, automated coding using Wordscores, Wordfish and keywords. We also use expert surveys and the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), covering the main parties in Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, between 1993 and 2013. We find high levels of consistency between expert positioning, manual sentence-by-sentence coding and manual checklist coding and poor or inconsistent results with the CMP, Wordscores, Wordfish and the dictionary approach. An often-neglected method – manual coding using checklists – offers resource efficiency with no loss in validity or reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ‘demand’ side of the market for political activism and analyses the extent to which grassroots activists of political parties and politically oriented civil society organizations (CSOs) resemble or differ. With data from several surveys of CSO and Green party activists in Spain we evaluate how much the pool of members from all these organizations are part of what can be identified as a single market of activists. After describing the socio-economic, political socialization and recruitment backgrounds, as well as the internal and external engagement of activists, we conclude that – while sharing some common features – activists of CSOs and Green parties are less alike than frequently assumed and that the analogy of a single market of political activism may be more misleading than helpful in our understanding of the challenges that parties face to counteract declining membership trends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]