Abstract
A decade ago, the housing market in the United States collapsed. Soon, the entire global financial system felt the squeeze. By the end of 2009, Europe was mired in debt crisis, creating a new politics that demanded austerity from indebted countries in exchange for debt relief. The crisis shook up once-stable political patterns. The established parties appeared to be both part of the problem and unable to offer any solution. The people took to the streets. In Greece, Spain, and Italy, new parties were able to mobilize this mounting discontent into electoral victories.
In Movement Parties against Austerity, Donatella della Porta, Joseba Fernández, Hara Kouki, and Lorenzo Mosca provide necessary perspective on the new “movement parties” of Southern Europe: SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) in Italy. The authors define “movement parties” as hybrids of movements and parties, which “have overlapping membership, co-organize various forms of collective action, fund each other, address similar concerns . . . [and] . . . participate in protest campaigns but also participate in electoral campaigns” (p. 7). Empirically, the study derived from an original analysis of interviews and primary documents, as well as considerable secondary sources. Analytically, the authors’ main goal is to explore “when movement parties arise” (p. 7).
To develop their comparison, the authors turn to the larger field of social movement theory and studies of political parties. In the book’s first chapter, they situate the study within this literature. Theoretically, one of their contributions is to organize this scholarship into a series of typologies to capture relations between parties and movements. They define four dominant party types, which developed in historical succession: (1) the party of notables, (2) interclass mass party, (3) electoral, catch-all, personal, cartel party, and (4) neoliberal populist party. These dominant party types are differentially related to historically specific movement parties: (1) ideological cadre party, (2) class-based mass party, (3) left-libertarian party, and (4) movement parties against austerity.
These historical typologies allow the authors to situate the new movement parties within a longer-term historical perspective and to consider the changing relations between parties and movements. Building directly on the findings of existing scholarship on Latin American movement parties, the authors contend that the ideological cadre party took a vanguard model and sought to control movements; class-based mass parties took up an electoral model that limited movement participation to electoral mobilization; and left-libertarian parties and movement parties against austerity deliberately blurred the relations between parties and movements, with the most recent movement parties developing in an often tense but productive dialectic relation with movements.
The book’s empirical core is a comparative study of the proximate origins and strategies of SYRIZA, Podemos, and M5S. Chapter Two considers the origins of the parties. Here, the authors note that the parties emerged from a shared “neoliberal critical juncture,” where space for new parties opened up as the traditional center-left party collapsed. Furthermore, they note that the parties took different positions toward the left: SYRIZA sought to unite the left, Podemos sought to recuperate left concerns into a new political common sense, and M5S developed a politically ambiguous catch-all identity.
Chapter Three examines the contrasting organizational forms of the parties. SYRIZA was a direct outgrowth of left parties in Greece and, as such, took a more hierarchical form. While SYRIZA mobilized movements, it never meaningfully incorporated them. Podemos, in contrast, is closer to the authors’ ideal type of a movement party against austerity. However, the bottom-up participatory structure of Podemos conflicts with the personalization of the party around Pablo Iglesias. The tendency toward personalization is even more pronounced in M5S, an “anti-party” that uses many innovative strategies to encourage popular participation but remains dominated by the charismatic leadership of Beppe Grillo.
Each of these parties succeeded, in part, because they transformed the discourse of anti-austerity movements into the rhetoric of the party. In Chapter Four, the authors analyze the differing framing strategies of each party. SYRIZA incorporated the mounting discontent with austerity into the traditional language of the left. Podemos sought a more definitive break with the past and tried to redefine a new popular politics beyond both the right and the left. In practice, however, the rhetoric of Podemos remained largely rooted in the traditional concerns of the left. Similarly, M5S sought to transcend old political divisions and, in some ways, it has. Unlike SYRIZA and Podemos, M5S has synthesized concerns of the right and left in an ambiguous politics.
In the final analysis, the authors argue that SYRIZA, Podemos, and M5S have won electoral victories precisely because they have been able to create some participatory channels to incorporate movements. In Chapter Five, they compare these successful cases with European parties that failed to win significant electoral victories. To gain perspective on the fates of parties in power, the authors consider the recent “Pink Tide” governments in Latin America. The experience of the unsuccessful European parties shows that economic shock is not enough. In Portugal and Ireland, inclusive welfare and clientelistic ties, respectively, prevented a collapse of center-left parties and the formation of new movement parties. The Pink Tide governments illustrate the difficulty in sustaining and institutionalizing popular participation in politics, particularly after the party takes national power.
In all, della Porta, Fernández, Kouki, and Mosca’s Movement Parties Against Austerity offers a clear and focused analysis of contemporary processes of political contention in Southern Europe, illustrating how movement parties were able to channel popular discontent into political realignments. The work makes an immediate contribution to’social movement theory and makes suggestive reading in the contemporary political context, where “populist” challenges from both the right and left are shaking up established political patterns across the world.
On this point, however, the authors’ theoretical and methodological choices may limit the contribution of the book. For example, the authors contend that contemporary movement parties against austerity are locked in a dialectical process of mutual formation with anti-austerity movements, which they view as historically unique. This typological clarity may obscure some important historical complexities. In particular, it is unclear what makes the relations between social movements and contemporary movement parties against austerity more “dialectical” than relations with previous iterations of movement parties.
The precise dynamics of conflict, cooperation, and change that define the historically specific relations between parties and movements could have been analyzed using dialectical methods if the authors had developed a more holistic methodology. Rather than abstracting “cases” out of their constitutive spatio-temporal context in the traditional comparative method, “incorporating comparison” within larger social relations would have allowed for a more complex accounting of the relations between movements and parties by setting them in relief against a shared structural ground (McMichael 1990). Such a holistic approach would better allow us to contrast contemporary movement parties with previous iterations. It would also expand the study outside the confines of social movement theory, posing broader questions concerning how the political incorporation of movements relates to ongoing processes of state formation. These potential contributions to broader literatures, however, are left implicit.