Can We Still Talk About ‘Movement-Parties’? The Southern European Radical Left and New Forms of Party Organisation

The emergence of new movement-parties in the anti-austerity mobilisation cycle of the 2010s is one of the most remarkable features of recent political changes in Southern Europe (Della Porta, Fernández, Kouki & Mosca, 2017). While the genesis of these parties has now been widely documented, little is known about how their modes of organisation have evolved over time: have the anti-austerity movement-parties preserved their innovative participatory mechanisms and new forms of commitment present at their foundation? Have they succeeded in maintaining or building close links with social movements? In short, can we still speak of movement-parties? The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of the ‘movement-party’ type in Southern Europe from a comparative perspective, focusing on three parties belonging to the Radical Left family : Podemos, Bloco de Esquerda and La France insoumise. Our analysis is based on a study of relevant party organisational documents and a systematic tracking of their internal procedures (congresses, internal votes, etc.). We also draw on existing literature and mobilise data from twelve semi-structured interviews with activists and officials from the three parties who specialise in organisational matters. Based on Kitschelt's original definition (2006) and recent work applying his analytical grid to far-right actors (Pirro & Gattinara, 2018), we propose to analyse the organisational evolution of the three parties according to three criteria: (1) organisational structure ; (2) decision-making processes ; (3) external mobilisation. Our analysis shows that the three parties today have characteristics that are distinct from each other, especially in terms of organisational structure and internal decision-making processes, and that, interestingly, Podemos, often presented as an archetypal movement-party, is the most distant from the original model. Based on our comparative analysis, we show that a wide variation can be observed in movement-parties and that it is worth distinguishing between different subtypes: the plebiscitary type, corresponding to Podemos, the charismatic-patrimonialist type, for La France insoumise, and the grassroots-democratic type, which applies to Bloco.