Harold D. Clarke, Allan Kornberg, Faron Ellis and Jon Rapkin, "Not for Fame or Fortune: A Note on Membership and Activity in the Canadian Reform Party," Party Politics, 6 (January 2000), 75-93.

First Paragraph:

Who joins political parties? What prompts people to become active party members? What difference does party organizational activity make? These are questions of long-standing concern to students of political parties and elections (e.g. Janda, 1993). In recent years, interest in these questions has been invigorated by research demonstrating that local organizational activity can have significant effects on parties' vote shares (Whiteley et al.,1994; Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1995; Denver and Hands, 1997; see also Black, 1984). That local parties' campaign efforts continue to matter in an age of nationally orientated, media-centered politics suggests that a party's short-term successes and long-term prospects will be enhanced if it can attract members and mobilize them to work on the party's behalf. Local organizational activity is especially crucial for new parties because they typically lack the financial and political resources available to their oldline rivals.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: The demographics of Reform party support, 1993 (%)
Table 2: Evaluations of the performance of Canadian political parties, 1993 (%)
Table 3: Reasons for becoming a member of the Reform Party, 1993 national survey (%)
Table 4: Reform party members' evaluations of government performance, 1993 (%)
Table 5: Distribution of Reform members on left-right ideological continuum, 1993 (%)
Table 6: Attitudes of Reform members towards direct democracy devices, 1993 (%)
Table 7: Recruitment and activity profiles of Reform party members, 1993
Table 8: Multiple regression analysis of factors affecting party activism among Reform party members, 1993

Last Paragraph:
Whether the party can rally the cohort of Ontario voters it needs to continue its march to national power remains to be seen. However, in an era when skyrocketing campaign costs place new parties at a severe disadvantage, the membership of parties like Reform provides a significant counterweight: low maintenance costs, ideological coherence and organizational stability all derive from members who require 'neither fame nor fortune' as incentives to contribute their money and their time to the cause. In combination with the ability to translate votes into seats, such a membership base can help new parties to gain entry to, and perhaps permanently reshape, long-lived and seemingly invulnerable national party systems.