Why do party elites preserve the “mass party”? The case of the populist radical right

At a moment of great uncertainty in Europe for established centre-left and centre-right parties characterised by falling membership and shrinking electoral support, this paper investigates the organisations of populist radical right parties (PRRPs), i.e. the party family that has been at the forefront of challenging the so-called “mainstream”. While parties are often seen to adopt increasingly light models of party organisation which are relatively cheap to run, several PRRPs remain committed to maintaining costly and complex mass organisations (Heinisch and Mazzoleni 2016; Albertazzi and Van Kessel 2021). Through these, they foster constant interaction between party elites, members and sympathisers, and create communities of loyal partisan activists. Drawing on the analysis of circa 100 interviews with party representatives from four European PRRPs (the League, the Finns Party, Flemish Interest and the Swiss People’s Party) we ask “what’s in it” for PRRPs that still invest in large organisations, allowing for rootedness, activism and participation. Our main focus is discussing why PPRP elites invest in mass party organisations, and analysing how they seek to preserve collective identities through ideology. Ultimately, the paper challenges the still-prevailing assumption that PRRPs tend to have an underdeveloped party organisation and heavily rely on charismatic leadership for their success. By arguing that the PRRPs’ creation and fostering of closed communities of political activists can lend credence to their populist claim that they are of, and for, ordinary people, the paper brings to the fore the extent to which organisational choices can themselves be revealed to be “ideological products” (Scarrow, 2015).