Moving beyond the Party? The Movement-ization of Party Organizations in Austria, Germany, and the UK

In the contemporary, the notion that party organizations should be more like movements has become ever more prominent and has led to a variety of party typologies conceptualizing emerging party organizations: from Kitschelts (2006) and Della Porta et al’s (2017) “movement parties” to Almeidas (2010) “social movement partyism”. Other emphasized the role of digitalization in creating new linkages between parties and citizens: “connective parties” (Bennett, Segerberg, & Knüpfer 2018), “digital parties” (Gerbaudo 2019a), “platform parties” (Gerbaudo 2019b), or “digital movement parties” (Deseriis 2019). However, the pressure of movement-ization is not limited to new party organizations. Since the 1980s, parties from almost all party families in established Western democracies have been debating organizational reforms to encounter shrinking trust, declining membership and dissolving social milieus. Established political parties, too, have incorporated elements of social movements, have facilitated more direct forms of membership participation, individualized participation opportunities, and have centralized their organization 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. Understood as adaptive organizations, parties reflect how societies demand democratic participation, co-determination, and political leadership. Hence, 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 (Beck 1992, Bauman 2012, Blühdorn & Butzlaff 2018, 2020). On the one hand, democratic values are thriving and direct participation of members and citizens has become a public norm. On the other hand, elections and party membership are considered inflexible and bureaucratic. As a result, the idea that movements might be the ideal types of democratic organization is proliferating. However, the understanding what exactly a movement-ization of party organization comprises and in which way it might induce a democratization or new party-society linkages, has remained ambiguous. Scholars have defined movement parties and political parties have launched organizational changes in very different ways. For instance, parties and party families differ greatly in how they approach demands for and processes of democratization and direct member/citizen influence (Correa-Lopera 2019). In this paper, I compare how established 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 the UK, I trace how different parties experience the pressure to movement-ize; if and how they seek to become movements. This way, we can understand how expectations of the democratic in Western liberal democracies are changing and how political parties as key organizations for political representation are affected.