The Fate of Social Movements’ Demands in Institutional Settings: Varieties of Successful Representation and Policy Implementation by Movement Parties in Italy and Germany

Movement parties, as originally defined by Kitschelt (2006), are parties formed by political activists originating from social movements and trying to apply social movements’ organisation and strategic practice to the arena of party competition. They are thus actors of a hybrid nature: with one foot in the party system and the other in the social movement world (Mosca 2019). Due to this hybrid nature, the agenda of movement parties often tends to directly reflect the political demands of the movements to which they are associated. However, since political parties follow different dynamics than movements, we also observe situations when their policy demands start to differ – if not in kind, then at least in intensity. This paper therefore asks the question: are movement parties successful transmitters of movements' policy demands into institutions and legislature of a country? In other words, are they representing the social movements or misrepresenting them? How did mass protests, social movements, and the rise of movement parties in Europe in the last decade affect policy-making? We find that both movement parties and traditional parties can benefit from associating with new social movements and representing the yet unaddressed political interests and discontent of the protesters. In fact, it can help both the popularity of political parties individually and the overall citizens’ trust in democratic practices. However, we demonstrate that ascent to power of a movement party does not automatically mean that all issues important for the social movement, from which it sprung, get represented on the institutional level. Many policy demands that define a social movement in the beginning fail to pass through the narrowing funnel of the institutional policy cycle. With regards to policy success, this paper shows that movement parties can influence policy-making and implement policy demands of their associated social movements in various ways. A party does not have to be in a governing coalition to achieve policy success, while being in a government coalition at the time of policy adoption does not ensure policy survival in the long-term. On the contrary, parties in opposition or with low representation in parliament are able to achieve important policy impact, despite their relatively low popularity in the elections. Policy and political representation success can actually be attributed to a number of diverse factors: close alignment with the movement, impact on the agenda-setting stage, influence on the voters' issue priorities, silent cooperation from other political parties, and direct participation in policy-making. The latter by itself does not ensure lasting policy success for a party. In fact, long-term policy impact can be ensured by choosing coalition partners that might disagree over the extent, but not the kind of policy measures proposed. The paper demonstrates these patterns of political representation by movement parties and their influence on policy-making in a comparative manner by investigating policy successes of four movement parties – two in Germany (AfD, die Grünen) and two in Italy (M5S, Federazione dei Verdi), - against the policy expectations of the social movements they represent.