A few senior members of al-Shabaab have surrendered in recent years, and their influence, combined with the existence of a vastly non-ideological membership, may leave open the possibility of dialogue around core grievances.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story stated incorrectly that the Congressional Progressive Caucus has ideological prerequisites for membership.
As far as the Philippines is concerned, it hardly ever had real mainstream political parties that could boast large-scale membership, ideological coherence, specific policy commitments and grass roots support.
Eight of those 11 are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but since there are no ideological prerequisites for membership in the nominally left-leaning CPC, few of them are reliably populist firebrands.
Ivan Krastev, a Sofia-based political scientist, believes that a political model based on clear ideological differences, mass memberships and strong party loyalties may have once worked well in "old Europe" but has signally failed to transplant to "new Europe".
With their membership falling, ideological differences blurring, and fewer people turning out to vote, the decline thesis looks hard to refute.Or does it?
Instrumentalists hold that ethnicity has very little or no independent ranking outside the political process and is in its character comparable to other political affiliations such as ideological beliefs or party membership.
"Politicians who, for example, dismantled compulsory student union membership on ideological grounds might be asked how this system is not a government-mandated tax on shooters, with no upper limit," Alpers said.
In contrast with the centralized, autocratic direction of the totalitarian single-party organization, with its emphasis on ideological conformity and restricted membership, the political parties of constitutional democracy are decentralized, concerned with the integration of many interests and beliefs, and open to public participation.
By contrast, Mr Blair used his victory in the 1994 leadership election to remake his party: build its membership, ditch its ideological baggage, and modernise its machinery.
Yet, placing the ASA in the context of numerous other scholarly organizations in country, it seems less odd that ASA decided to boycott Israeli academic institutions and more odd that the numerous other scholarly and academic organizations view themselves as apolitical or even unwilling to foster a debate among their membership about their ideological orientations.
