Pathways into Political Party Membership:Case Studies of Hong Kong Youth

This article explores and conceptualizes the individual mobilization processes into political party membership of a sample of young people in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous and semi-democratic region under Chinese sovereignty where political parties are relatively underdeveloped. Based on life history interviews with 23 young party members, I found that the mobilization of young people into party membership comprises three different steps. I also found that not all young party members went through the same order of steps. In total, three orders of steps are identified, which create three different paths into party membership. Lastly, this article found that each mobilization path is shaped by a specific set of macro-, meso-, and individual level influences. Keywords: Party Membership, Young People, Life History, Hong Kong, MobilizationAmple evidence from recent years show that party membership in many Western democracies have shrunk substantially and this decline is particularly evident in the younger generations (van Biezen, Mair, & Poguntke, 2011; van Biezen & Poguntke, 2014). Young people in many Western democracies are increasingly turning away from institutional forms of political participation such as voting and tending to favor extra-institutional forms of activism such as protests, single-issue movements, and online activism (Flanagan & Levine, 2010; Norris, 2003; Quintelier, 2007). This phenomenon has stimulated scholars to investigate the reasons behind the decline of party membership (Scarrow, 2007; Seyd & Whiteley, 2004; van Biezen & Poguntke, 2014) and how and why some young people still choose to join and engage in political parties (Bruter & Harrison, 2009; Cross & Young, 2008a; 2008b). The reluctance of the young people to join political parties also exists in non-Westem democracies and semi-democratic regimes such as Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong (Choy, 1999; Lin, 2013; Ma, 2007; Tan, 2010). However, limited research has been conducted in these contexts. Moreover, most literature on party membership focuses on finding the contextual factors leading individuals to join political parties but neglects the processes through which individuals are mobilized into party membership and how the factors are temporally woven together to produce the outcome (Harley et al., 2009). This paper contributes to bridging these research gaps by exploring and conceptualizing the processes through which a sample of young people came to join political parties in Hong Kong, which is a semi-democratic and semi-autonomous regime under Chinese sovereignty where political parties are relatively underdeveloped and noninstitutionalized (Lam, 2010; Lau & Kuan, 2002). Specifically, I use life history method (Denzin, 1989; Roberts, 2002) to examine the processes that resulted in the decision of 23 young people in Hong Kong to join political parties and to identify the important contextual and individual factors at play in the processes.It was found that the mobilization of young people into party membership is a threestep process shaped by a variety of macro- and meso-level contextual factors as well as the individual agency of the young people. The different configurations and interactions of the factors lead young people to go through the steps in three different orders, which in turn create three paths into party membership.This paper is divided into six sections. The first section is the background, which gives a brief description of the development of political parties and party membership in Hong Kong. The second section reviews a host of influences explaining individual participation in political parties and explains why we should go beyond the search for factors and shift the focus to the processes through which people are mobilized into parties. The third section describes the methodology of the study. The fourth section presents the results. It first presents the steps and paths into party membership identified from the interview data, and then describes the contextual and individual factors at play in the mobilization processes. …