One of my business partners, Rana Sarkar, is the founder of the Progressive North Forum in Canada and is preparing a conference in Toronto on October 20th with a question - "What's the Party For?" It is an interesting question - in this age of "distributed democracy".
One of the challenges that European parties (I am leveraging my experiences from England, mainly) is that they have difficulty because of the structure of their party. These parties are primarily membership driven - similar to other membership organizations, you pay membership dues to become a card-carrying member. But in today's world, where many people revel in the freedom of choice and wish to express their independence, how does a party attract new members, and not simply churn the ever smaller group of people, over and over again?
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