Movement Parties: their rise, variety, and consequences

While political party research points to the hollowing out of traditional parties and declining rates of participation in electoral politics (Mair 2013; van Biezen, Mair, and Poguntke 2012), social movement studies emphasize the increasingly important role of the protest arena in mobilizing discontent (Giugni and Grasso 2019; Dalton 2008). The two strands of literature largely lived separate lives (McAdam and Tarrow 2010) and only recently were combined in the study of movement parties as hybrid forms of organizations that blend electoral and protest mobilization to channel discontent (della Porta et al. 2017; Hutter, Lorenzini, and Kriesi 2019). The proposed workshop aims to bring political party and social movement scholars together and invite them to reflect on the rise, variety and consequences of movement parties in Europe. According to Kitschelt (2006), movement parties represent a transitory form of mobilization between social movements and political parties, and are characterized by limited investment in solving problems of collective action and social choice. In Europe, this new form of party has emerged amidst a wave of popular discontent, stoked by the financial crisis, the ensuing austerity, and long-term disenchantment with political institutions. These parties - such as Podemos in Spain, the Movimento Cinque Stelle in Italy, and Jobbik in Hungary —have captured aspirations for change, as well as anger and anxieties about globalisation, migration and the socio-economic and cultural upheaval that a dynamic of cleavage formation have wrought. The rise of movement parties has also been studied in the Latin American context (Anria 2013; 2018), and in the US and Canada (Schwartz 2006). Across the globe, we observe great variation among ‘movement parties’ in terms of their origin, ideological profile, media strategy and organization form. Different contextual factors underpin the varied pathways. While many of them represent social movements that are new to electoral politics, some originate from parties that take movement-like organizational and ideological features to mobilize in protest politics (Muldoon and Rye 2020; Blings 2020). They occupy the breadth of the ideological spectrum — from the far right (Caiani and Císař 2019; Pirro and Castelli Gattinara 2018) to the radical left (Della Porta et al. 2017), however, it remains an open question as to the extent to which they formulate an ideologically or strategically radical alternative to existing formations. The workshop aims to take up the various conceptual and empirical challenges in mapping and explaining their variation. The rise and successes of movement parties has consequential effects on broader patterns of democratic politics, representation, mobilization, and participation. They have the potential to reinvigorate democratic participation by bridging the electoral and protest arenas, or — by radicalizing the ‘grass-roots’ — open a new pathway for democratic backsliding. Their emergence might result in a spiral of polarisation where strong movement-party alliances impede political compromises (McAdam and Kloos 2014). The workshop focuses on differentiating similar sequences and pinpointing the diverse set of consequences the rise of movement parties has for various aspects of democratic politics.