Farewell to the jack-of-all-trades activists? Clustering party activism in Spain

Abstract

This article aims to identify different modes of participation among the more active members within political parties and explore the reasons behind this variation. Previous research has focused on the hierarchical position of members according to their attachment to the organization to explain different types of activism. However, less attention has been paid to the horizontal variation among party activists. Our study employs survey data from delegates attending party conferences between 2008 and 2017 in Spain and applies cluster analysis to identify the presence of different types of activists within parties. We further perform multinomial logistic regression to identify the drivers of the four types of activists (mass party activists, committed activists, canvasser activists, and cheering activists) resulting from the cluster analysis. Our findings show that both individual factors (socioeconomic status and incentives for joining) and party factors (party age, access to institutions, territorial coverage) are relevant for explaining variation in party activism.