Parties, Militants, and Protesters: Towards a New Typology of Party-Street Interactions

The relationship of political parties with social movements and contentious collective actors remains a problematic and shifting dimension of political and sociological scholarship. Despite a relatively long-standing recognition that the boundaries between different modes of political interest articulation ‘are empirically fussy’ (Kitschelt, 2006, 278), scholars of party politics still generally approach collective social action as a separate and often alternative domain to institutionalised politics. On the other hand, social movement scholarship concentrates on mobilisation processes and indirect forms of influence, while sidelining linkages with party and electoral politics. This paper takes issue with this divide. The paper proposes a novel typology of political parties on the basis of two analytical angles: one considering the positioning of parties against ‘bases’ that may be mobilised electorally, the classical focus of party politics literature, the other the manner in which they relate with ‘sympathetic’ observers that may be mobilized contentiously, the focus of social movement literature. Drawing insight from both bodies of scholarship, the papers elaborates the resulting ideal-types against the conventional reading of modern electoral parties ‘away from the street’, outlining analytical and empirical gaps and re-framing recent developments in both Latin America and Europe.