Just call me movement: Party (re-)branding in Europe

Party systems across Europe are under pressure to adapt to shifting societal cleavages, the rise of anti-establishment sentiment, and increasingly popular challengers in electoral and protest politics. While the scholarly literature emphasizes the programmatic dimension of party system change and how established parties respond by shifting issue emphasis and positions, changes in action repertoires, labels, and organizational features are less often studies. However, the rise of so-called movement parties represents a significant organizational innovation in electoral mobilization as well. Typically, movement parties should rely on more networked, horizontal organizational structures, with robust accountability mechanisms between party members and leadership. Adopting movement characteristics is considered as a competitive advantage of challenger parties, which makes adopting them attractive to the mainstream. Thus, we might witness a more profound transformation of the organizational landscape of party politics, affecting newly emerging movement parties and mainstream parties alike. In the current paper, we ask, to what extent and under what conditions do political parties adopt ‘movement labels,’ and does that correspond to more networked organizational features? Our main contribution is mapping the big picture of the development of movement labels across Europe since 1945. To do so, we rely on original data on the names of political parties and the extent to which they have moved away from referring to themselves as ‘parties’ towards adapting alternative labels, such as “movement,” “league,” or “force.” In a second step, we consider secondary data sources to link party labels with organizational features. We study the emergence of non-party labels as both a branding decision by new parties and an attempt at re-branding made by existing formations. Our preliminary results show that non-party labels are a feature of individual formations and a system-level characteristic. We differentiate between the two extreme cases: party systems where the norm is that all formations are parties, and party systems where no formation has “party” in its name. We argue that the (non-)use of the “party” denomination has no signaling value in the latter type of systems. In the in-between systems where only some formations have “party” in their name, we show that movement-like mobilization forms characterize left-wing non-parties independent of them being part of the mainstream or the challenger camp. In this regard, programmatic differences prove to be more critical than functional distinctions in explaining organizational divergence. Regarding over-time developments, we show an increasing trend to take on non-party labels in older party systems in Western Europe. In contrast, in Eastern Europe, the share of formations with non-party labels fluctuates with no clear trend over time. These results highlight the specific conditions under which party labels act as a signaling device of organizational features.