There is no reliable information on membership figures. The party review Unión Patriótica claimed in 1927 that there were 1,319,428 people on the rolls;[1] in 1928 the same source reported the figure as 1,696,304.[2] Most historians consider these figures fairly meaningless and note that they probably reflect bureaucratic ingenuity rather than the scale of genuine recruitment.[3] However, some scholars settle for official figures, e.g. in the province of Almería the UP membership is estimated at 30,000[4] and in mid-size Valencian towns like Gandia, Torrent or Utiel at 500–1,000 members.[5]
An official yet not public note from Primo de Rivera, dated 1929, estimated membership at 600–700,000.[6] Many historians tend to settle for even smaller figures, ranging from 400,000[7] to 500,000.[8] These estimates are pretty much a guesswork, though some scholars base their calculations on circulation of the UP daily La Nación, at its peak printed in 50,000 copies.[9]
Figures in the range of 1.3m–1.7m would suggest the membership rate of some 6–8% (compared to the entire population), figures in the range of 0.4–0.5m would point to some 2%. In comparison to other state parties, in the mid-1930s some 10% of the Italian population were on the rolls of PNF;[10] in 1937 some 8% of Germans were members of NSDAP.[11] The communist state parties of the late 20th century recorded a membership rate between 4% in the USSR[12] to 8–10% in Poland[13] or Czechoslovakia.[14] FET y de las JONS, the state party during the Francoist dictatorship, boasted of some 0.9m members in 1942, around 3% of the Spanish population.[15]