Party System Transformation from Below

Recent changes in European politics – such as the rise of so-called movement parties from both left and right – challenge the still prevalent disciplinary boundaries between research on parties and party systems, on the one hand, and social movement studies, on the other. The study of similar phenomena calls for reconsidering the linkages between protest dynamics and party system transformations. In this paper, we contribute to the theoretical and empirical understanding of the mechanisms and processes unfolding in periods of such intensified interactions between protest and electoral politics. More specifically, we provide a paired comparison of the dynamics of conflict in two countries (i.e., Hungary and Germany) and a total of four protest-induced periods of party system transformation. In the Hungarian case, we focus on the moment of the transition to democracy when the first political parties and protest movements appeared after the fall of the communist regime, and on the period between 2002-2010 when Fidesz invested into establishing its own civil society hinterland which provided the societal basis of its return to power with a constitutional majority. In the German case, we focus on the emergence of the Green party in the 1980s and its close connections to other new social movements, and on the more recent interactions between Pegida and other far-right protest groups with the new radical right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). The set of four cases provide us with a most-different systems design where despite apparent differences in temporal, spatial and ideological terms, we find remarkable similarities in the way political parties and protest dynamics interact. Based on these similarities, we propose a general map of interactions between the two arenas of representation. Empirically, we explore the different types of interactions relying on a mix of quantitative evidence, such as protest event and public opinion data, and process tracing based on secondary material.