| Autor: |
De Campo, Marianne Egger |
| Předmět: |
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| Zdroj: |
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie; 1998, Vol. 23 Issue 1, p20-42, 23p, 1 Diagram, 3 Charts, 2 Graphs |
| Abstrakt: |
According to Max Weber, political parties play the role of either ideological parties or patronage organizations. Transferred to modern Western democracies, this description should be applicable to concrete empirical parties and predict the motives of their members. Instrumentally rational (zweckrational) persons will prefer patronage organizations while value rational (wertrational) individuals will rather be interested in parties as ideological institutions. The author gives a brief overview of Austrian democracy and describes the party system as mainly patronage-oriented for most of the postwar era. The question arises whether the now decreasing number of party members is a sign of changing roles in the Austrian political system. The author analyzes data of some 250 former members of the Social Democratic Party who were interviewed by the party organization about the causes for their withdrawals, revealing that the vast majority (56%) cite patronage reasons. Only about a quarter of the interviewees leave the party because of ideological dissent. This leads to the conclusion that, given that patronage is declining as a motive for party membership, the Austrian democratic parties might be facing a period of transition towards more ideological substance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
| Databáze: |
Complementary Index |
| Externí odkaz: |
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