Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of political parties by the number of members in them


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Only the creator of the article objected, and I feel that their arguments have been convincingly refuted.--Ymblanter (talk) 08:02, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

List of political parties by the number of members in them

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List of political parties, exclusively in Europe save for a few isolated random exceptions, arranged by how many members they have. I'm really struggling to think of a single reason why this would even be a useful or interesting comparison to be made across international borders in the first place — so the Chinese Communist Party has more members than the Swedish Moderate Party does? Great, now tell me why I should think that matters. China is a single-party state in which there isn't any other political party that anyone can join, in a country with a population of about a billion, while all of the other countries with parties listed are multiparty democracies whose entire population is smaller than the membership of the Chinese Communist Party alone, so the list just isn't giving me a useful point of comparison from one party to another. But even more importantly, the number of members that a political party has is in a constant state of flux: new members join, and old members die or move out of the country or quit, every single day, which makes a list of this type unmaintainable cruft that would literally have to be updated daily to remain accurate. Delete. Bearcat (talk) 15:54, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. Northamerica1000(talk) 16:45, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Northamerica1000(talk) 16:45, 17 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom. Unmaintainable because of constantly changing numbers, and as there's no single source collecting this, the most recent available data for each party will not be from the same time. That, and the fact that countries have drastically different voting population sizes and political structures, keeps this from being a meaningful comparison. postdlf (talk) 17:17, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete - per concerns noted above. Not much more I can add. Ansh666 19:33, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete per above, although not much policy has been cited. I guess WP:V could apply, as it would be hard to verify membership numbers, as Bearcat pointed out.  —Theodore! (talk) (contribs) 00:46, 18 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete per above, the list does not compare like for like. The criteria for joining a party vary from one country to another. e.g. in China (as above) people might have benefits from joining, better job opportunities, better schooling for their children etc. In some states in the US people need to be affiliated with a party to vote in it's primaries. In Israel with direct PR there are 12 parties in the Knesset with a further 20 in the most recent elections.Martin 4 5 1  (talk) 05:39, 18 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Don't Delete Isn't the "list of countries by population" a constant fluxuation? why should the article be deleted? it needs an update once a month, not more, Just the name of the article is a litlle problem, and by the way, it's not just europe, you can add all parties in the world, there is nothing sayng just about Europe, I just couldn't find more Parties outside Europe with acurate references to them... so there are allot of parties that are not added to the list, since I have not found any reference, and it is an interesting list, maybe not to you, but to other people it might be interesting, to know wich is the biggest party in the world, and wich is the smalest, maybe they want to add their party to the list... The list is about members of each party around the world, not the criteria wich you need to join, and the benefits of joining the specific party... — Preceding unsigned comment added by AlexaHR (talk • contribs) 12:28, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It's an apples-to-oranges comparison that simply doesn't tell you anything meaningful about any party. The population of a country puts a hard, impenetrable cap on how many members it's even possible for a political party in that country to have, for starters — even if every single person in Bermuda were a member of the One Bermuda Alliance it would still have less than one per cent the number of members that the Chinese Communist Party does, and that's before you even consider the fact that the One Bermuda Alliance is one of several political parties in Bermuda while the Chinese Communist Party is the only political party in China. And what value does it have to even look at the membership numbers of a political party in, for instance, a violent dictatorship which uses state force to obligate support of the dictator, and thus members aren't necessarily joining the party because they agree with its ideology, but rather because they're afraid for their lives if they don't?
 * A list that compared political parties by their market penetration (i.e. their membership as a percentage of the country's total population) might actually tell you something useful (but it couldn't be collated without a whole lot of original research calculations, so don't try it), but raw numbers just don't convey anything useful. And the fact that you explicitly admitted that you can't find accurate reliable sources for most political parties in the world, for that matter, should have been a clue that maybe this wasn't a good idea — for most political parties, in fact, there are no sources for their membership data except the parties themselves (i.e. invalid WP:PRIMARYSOURCES.) Countries' total populations are different; since countries conduct censuses, there are reliable objective sources out there for the data — and the fact that those sources don't keep a perfect up-to-the-minute running tally doesn't matter, because saying that a country has a population of 50 million, falsely implying that it's a constant total that never goes up or down, is not the same thing as saying that a country had a population of 50 million in its 2010 census.
 * And furthermore, all you have to do to be part of a country's population is to exist in that country — whereas joining a political party is a choice that you have to make, and by definition that choice is inseparable from the social context that you live in (the membership criteria, the benefits, the social power structure of the country, etc.) Is it a one-party state where there's no other party for you to join even if you wanted to? Is it a stable multiparty democracy where you have complete freedom to join any political party you want? Is it an in-name-only multiparty democracy where the party in power still routinely uses harassment and intimidation and violence against the opposition parties? Is it a corrupt country where your ability to even get a job in the first place might depend on joining a political party? Is it a more free country where you also have the liberty to not give a hoot about politics or join any political party at all? So you can't say that the list isn't about those things — because they're built right into the very definition of how the choice to join a political party gets made in the first place. Bearcat (talk) 18:15, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.