Movement and Party Participation – From Partners to Adversaries

Abstract

The research on political parties, on participation and on social movements is circling around similar questions of how individual and societal interests are integrated into a democracy yet uses different angles, methods and concepts that often enough stay strictly separated from each other. Nevertheless for a long period of time party and movement participation was very closely interlinked as parties and movements perceived themselves as complementary and fulfilling different roles in order to pursue the same goals – movements as societal grassroots organizations and parties as their parliamentary arm. This cadence has since long been coming out of balance as since the critique of political parties by the new social movements their respective roles have become more and more antagonistic. While political parties have become the supposed defenders of the status quo it is a standard claim of social movements to tackle the forces of societal persistence in a much more effective way. Processes of societal modernization have fundamentally altered the relationship between the strategic and prefigurative action repertoire of social movements and parties alike. Still, the differences and similarities of their membership with regard to expectations, hopes and democratic attitudes remain unclear as do possible strategic complementarities with regard to the organization of social change. This panel seeks to bring together the research perspectives on political parties, movements and participation to integrate their functions for a contemporary diagnosis of the societal links of modern democracy. The panel invites papers that investigate the relationship between movement and party participation, between the role movements and parties play within democracy and between the expectations and self-images movements and parties uphold, especially if comparing the insights from the different and somehow still separated bodies of literature.