Managing the Democratic Ambivalence. Participatory Party Reforms and the Movement-Ization of Parties in Austria, Germany, and Great Britain

Since the 1980s, parties from almost all party families in established Western democracies have been discussing organizational reforms to encounter shrinking trust, declining membership and dissolving social milieus. Established political parties have (to varying degrees) incorporated elements of social movements into party organization. As bureaucratic and hierarchical party organizations had begun to look clumsy and inflexible, parties have facilitated more and more direct forms of membership participation, individualized participation opportunities, and have centralized their structure in order to provide more efficient political decision-making. A short glimpse at contemporarily successful political parties left and right shows that, apparently, the promise of political and social change today requires to be more movement-fuelled than ever before. This has led to a number of party typologies highlighting the hybrid character of party organization: from Kitschelts (2006) and Della Porta et al’s (2017) “movement parties” to Almeidas (2010) “social movement partyism”. Other scholars focused on organizational changes using new technologies: “connective parties” (Bennett, Segerberg, & Knüpfer 2018), “digital parties” (Gerbaudo 2019a), “platform parties” (Gerbaudo 2019b), or “digital movement parties” (Deseriis 2019). Understood as adaptive organizations, a perspective on organizational change of political parties might shed a light on how parties react to changing social surroundings – and how expectations and hopes for democratic participation, representation and political leadership have evolved. Social theory approaches on the development of Western societies have suggested a deeply remoulded meaning of democracy, participation and individual identity as the result of underlying currents of social modernization processes. Inter alia, the concepts of “liquid identity” (Bauman 2012), “post-politics” (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014) and the “post-democratic turn” (Blühdorn & Butzlaff 2018, 2020) seek to conceptualize how established mechanisms of democracy are being considered more and more ambivalent. On the one hand, democratic values are thriving and direct participation of members and citizens has become a public norm, on the other hand, democracy does not unanimously entail an emancipatory promise anymore. The research on party change has detected several tensions and paradoxes between inner-party democratization and the centralization of leadership (Gauja 2017; Faucher 2015; Katz & Mair 2018), and has asked whether the realized organizational changes were genuinely democratic, or if they were staging and simulating democratization. As party organizations and party planners as political individuals are part of wider social developments, in this paper I scrutinize how parties experience and react to changing societal conditions and evolving expectations of members, sympathizers, and voters. In a series of qualitative interviews with party organizers and planners of the social-democratic and conservative party family in Austria, Germany, and Great Britain, in this paper I compare different strategies and perspectives on how to adapt to shifting societies. Through the lens of social theory, I argue that growing democratic ambivalence and new political subjectivities have changed democratic expectations altogether. By analyzing how parties seek to become movements, we can understand how the seemingly paradoxical expectations of empowerment and efficiency might be reconciled in the practice of political parties.