Puolue ja poliittinen osallistuminen

Kirjoittajat

• Pertti Pesonen

Abstrakti

Universal and equal suffrage is the norm, but actual political participation is not equal. This paper finds inequalities in the extent to which different political parties activate their members and supporters, which then has consequences for the general picture of the party system on different levels of partisanship. Four two-party systems and four multi-party systems are compared with comparable survey data from the »Eight nation Study» (ZA, Cologne, Study-No 0765). — In several countries the party activists and the »silent majority» differ in their partisan distribution; minor parties have particular difficulties in motivating their supporters to do party work; but some small radical groups rely heavily upon their activists; the leftist parties tend to have more active supporters than the others, but some examples are also seen of the »U- curve»-shaped distribution with an inactive center. — Ideological distances between the parties (on the left/right dimension) have very different magnitudes in different party systems. In all countries the activists are further apart than the inactive party supporters. Likewise, the strong party identifiers are much more apart than the weak identifiers. — People’s subjective sense of political competence and political efficacy is more related to the objective than the subjective party memberships. Partisanship tends to equalize the different political resources of different socio-economic groups.