Internalising the Insurgency: Understanding the Interaction of Radical Anti-Establishment and Mainstream Parties

Abstract

In recent years, the presumptive cordon sanitaire between radical and mainstream parties has been repeatedly broken, not only at the level of formal cooperation between parties, movements and movement parties, but at the level of ideas and personnel, with mainstream parties opting for rhetoric, modes of mobilisation (such as the co-optation of social movement strategies) and policy stances hitherto considered the preserve of the radicals. Rather than repelling insurgents, mainstream parties have sought to answer the challenges these parties pose by – at least in part – internalising the insurgency. In turn, this has generated new challenges and opportunities for radical parties. It is still relatively rare for radicals to govern alone; rather, in several countries, radical parties have seen their political preferences reach the mainstream political agenda, but at the price of losing control of the realisation of those preferences. In these circumstances, it is increasingly important to understand how mainstream parties and radical parties interact in a political sphere in which the differences between them are ever fuzzier in character. This panel includes theoretical and empirical papers which address the broad question of how radical and mainstream parties interact with one another: what kinds of interactions we observe; how mainstream parties absorb radical politics both at the level of issues and the level of mobilisation strategies; how radical parties respond to the internalisation of their political objectives by the mainstream, and how this dialectic is reshaping the very notions of what we mean by mainstream and radical politics in contemporary democracies.