The Political Impact of Movement Strategies on Governance

Despite the conventional wisdom that social movements relate to the state in two ways, i.e., the state would block movements or reluctantly yield to movement demands, social movement scholars identified varied patterns of relationships between institutionalized and non-institutionalized politics. According to this research stream, social movements, political parties, and the state may compete, complement, or interpenetrate one another to gain (or maintain) constituency support. This perspective elucidates the vague, permeable boundary between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics and illuminates otherwise overlooked modes of citizen engagement. Instead of treating these modes as collateral (as is often the case in movement research), I draw on them to systematize movement strategies and examine the impact of resulting forms of citizen engagement on governance. I delineate four movement strategies along two dimensions: (1) strategic orientation to state power: how movement organizations engage political parties in social struggles, and (2) strategic orientation to constituency power: how movement organizations bolster the position of their constituencies within emerging alliances contesting the existing order. The variations along the state power – constituency power axes are as follows: (1.1) movement organizations engage in the long-term work of building an ideological alliance with a party; or (1.2) movement organizations consider political parties as constantly moving campaign targets, depending on their stance on a particular issue; while (2.1) movement organizations articulate constituency interest on behalf of a mass base; or (2.2) movement organizations articulate constituency interest by using other, cultural, policy, or organizational, resources. This paper demonstrates the analytical capacity of this 2x2 framework to examine how different forms of social movements’ engagement in politics affect governance across regimes. The research is designed as a comparative case study of Hungarian housing struggles between 1987 and 2024, examining movement impact across three hegemonic phases of state-building: state socialist, neoliberal, and illiberal. I study the effects of the strategic orientations through the struggles of conservative large families, who maintained a close alignment with conservative parties and nurtured a mass base, and of people about to be evicted, whose various constituents considered political parties to be constantly moving campaign targets. The primary data sources for the two case studies are printed and online media articles (N=1,420), organizational documents (N=438), and semi-structured interviews with movement leaders and experts (n=12). My results show that movement organizations have the greatest potential to contribute to a systemic shift when they leverage the dependence of political parties on movement constituencies and translate that dependence into influence over the structure of a new emerging social and political alliance. Movement organizations can achieve this most effectively when they combine social and organizational embeddedness – a mass base – with a long-term strategic political alignment with a party. This strategic orientation enabled the conservative large families’ movement organization, countering the neoliberal regime, to shift it toward a distinctive conservative welfare framework centered on large families and prioritizing the nation’s demographic survival, thereby reinforcing Viktor Orbán and Fidesz’s struggle for political dominance.