Abstract
This article focuses on the relationship between social movements and political parties in the context of populist challenges to constitutional democracy. There are many reasons for the current plight of democracy but I focus here on one aspect: the decline of mainstream political parties, the emergence of new forms of populist movement parties and the general crisis of political representation in long consolidated Western democracies. This article analyses the specific political logic and dynamics of social movements – the logic of influence, and distinguishes it from that of political parties – the logic of power. It addresses transformations in movements, parties and their relationships. It looks at the shifts in movement and party types that constitute the political opportunity structure for the emergence of new populist movement party forms and relationships, focusing on the hollowing out and movement-ization of political parties. Contemporary populist movement parties are not the cause of the hollowing out or movement-ization of political parties. Rather they are a response to the crisis of political representation exemplified by hollow parties and cartel parties. But it is my thesis that thanks to its specific logic, populism fosters the worst version of movement party relationships, undermining the democratic functions of both.
Keywords
This article rethinks the movement party relationship in the context of populist challenges to democracy. There are many reasons for the current plight of democracy. 1 I focus here on one aspect: the crisis of political representation and the emergence of populist movements and parties in long consolidated Western democracies. The distinction between political parties and social movements is central to modern democratic theory, although how they do or should interrelate is controversial. It is also a neglected topic by political theorists. The movement party relation seems to capture the interest of political and social theorists episodically – interest spikes in contexts of widespread cycles of contentious politics portending realignment or demise of an existing party/political system, shifting the paradigmatic understanding of democratic politics – its actors, issues, values and institutional practices.
The pluralist-consensus school in political science, hegemonic in the 1950s in the United States, together with the collective behaviour school in sociology, did address ‘mass movements’ and contentious unconventional ‘collective behaviour’ in a relatively quiescent period, but construed them as threats to democracy, not as normal features of democratic politics. They deemed interest group and party politics as rational, moderating and the only acceptable form of democratic participation besides voting. 2 Clearly informed by the recent past of fascist, National Socialist and Communist movement parties and oppressive anti-democratic governments, the respective political and social theorists embraced the post-war consensus that saw economic growth, national security and some version of the welfare state based on class compromise as the positive-sum basis for political democracy mediated through party competition. Accordingly, they construed un-institutionalized, unconventional mass collective action as deviant, irrational, exceptional and dangerous – as a response to and against modernization that, like anti-system party movements (fascist or communist), had to be contained and which would eventually dissipate once the benefits of modernity and progress were secured. 3
This consensus was challenged with the rise of ‘the new social movements’ in the 1960s and 1970s. New theoretical paradigms were devised to analyse their strategies, identities and their democracy-enhancing roles. 4 The progressive civil society-based movements – civil rights, feminism, ecology, peace – articulated issues that were excluded from the produce-rist welfare state compromise, and by the restriction of politics to party competition and negotiations with select interest groups (labour unions and business organizations) and the state. They rejected illegitimate, exclusionary cultural stereotypes and denounced socio-economic injustices based on denigrated, marginalized identities as well as the failure of parties to translate their concerns into the arena of institutionalized politics and public policy. The role of the new movements in undermining civil privatism, and in mobilizing public opinion and social protest action in the civil and political public spheres came to be seen by many social theorists as a key factor in the further democratization of formally democratic polities, and civil societies.
There were also ‘fundamentalist’ elements in the new social movements that rejected ‘the establishment’, challenged the procedural and constitutionalist features of liberal (and social democratic) democracies and called for alternatives to party politics in the name of movement purity and participatory democracy. Criticizing the ‘legalistic’ ‘merely’ formal character of constitutional democracy and rejecting power-oriented interest-based party politics associated with it, respective theorists and activists portrayed the popular forms of direct participation in their social movement as prefiguring a radical ‘truly democratic’ alternative. They wanted not only inclusion into or influence on, but also, radical transformation of the party political system and the old political paradigm. If they remained outside the actual party political system, the purist anti-establishment factions in the various movements and their organic intellectuals’ oppositional stances could play a democratizing role by signalling new needs, triggering responses of other parties towards inclusion of the excluded and so on.
Some of the new social movements, however, did participate in the electoral game, forming what they portrayed as anti-party parties. Yet these too could play a democratizing role so long as they remained out of power (with other established parties taking up their issues) or, once elected, if they abandoned their fundamentalist logic, anti-establishment rhetoric, and accepted differentiation between the movement and party aspects of their organization along with the legitimacy of the opposition, of compromise and alliances. The evolution of the European Green parties is a case in point. 5 Alternatively, movements can ally with established major parties and become powerful factions within them. 6 However, as McAdam has shown drawing on the American experience of the civil rights movement and the New Left, a risk is the movement-ization of parties and extremist polarization of politics. Important social movements typically generate countermovements. 7 Indeed the segregationist, racist, anti-feminist, anti-Green nativist countermovements along with the populist leaders they spawned like George Wallace, are a case in point. If as independents or as party factions, they succeed in replacing traditional hierarchical party structures and procedures that once ensured party control over candidate selection with movement forms of ‘participatory democratic institutions’, such as primaries, outside funding and now digital platforms, then this paradoxically can undermine instead of fostering the autonomy and effectiveness of parties. 8 The anti-establishment, anti-elitist, anti-hierarchical bias of this form of movement power within parties may seem more ‘democratic’ and inclusive than smoke-filled back rooms of party elites deciding everything, but it also can also be a sham, foster extremism and exacerbate political inequality. 9 The outcome of the movement-ization of parties is thus ambivalent for liberal democracy.
We seem to be in another round of widespread contentious social movements and serious challenges to ‘establishment party politics’, this time from ‘left’ and ‘right’ populists. Much like the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary populists critique ‘the establishment’, challenge traditional political parties as elitist and corrupt usurpers of popular sovereignty. They too invoke people power and argue against hierarchical party relations in favour of horizontal linkages, participatory forms of democratic inclusion of ordinary citizens in politics and direct ‘unmediated’ relations with their ‘representatives’, as an alternative to elite control of the political system. Other similarities with the movements and countermovements of the earlier period are the lack of trust in the existing forms of representation, shifts in cleavage structures, articulation of and mobilization around unrepresented claims and marginalized identities and the critique of consensus politics this time around neo-liberal austerity rather than the regulatory state. Indeed the movement party relations emerging out of the current wave of contentious politics are superficially similar to the two forms of movement-ization of parties that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s: alliance of established parties with the relevant movement actors and the latter’s emergence within the party as an important faction, and/or the rise of movement parties, in the United States and Europe, respectively. Challenges to the rigidity, exclusions, and the unrepresentative, unresponsive, unaccountable character of an existing party system or set of democratic institutions are inherent in representative democracy because democracy is always a ‘verite a faire’ – an unfinished project. As such, it is a ‘telic’ normative concept with an inherent teleology aimed at the better realization of ideals of inclusiveness, equality, social justice, voice and social solidarity along with fair electoral procedures. 10
Nevertheless, it is my thesis that today’s populist electoral movement parties up the anti in movement party relations and pose a distinctive threat to democratic politics due to the specific logic and strategy of populism. Populist movement parties or established parties captured by populists are far less capable of compromise, negotiation or cooperation with other parties once in power because they cannot acknowledge their legitimacy or of a pluralist civil society, since only they can speak for and represent the ‘authentic’ people. 11 Once in power they tend to challenge crucial features of constitutional democracy, they label as ‘liberal’, because on populist logic the people’s democratic will cannot be limited or divided. But unlike earlier frankly authoritarian movement parties (fascist, Nazi, communist) they retain the veneer of democratic legitimacy – elections – and use legal means to undo constitutionalist and democratic norms and institutions. Moreover, populist parties cannot differentiate between their movement and party logics while remaining populist, insofar as they claim the outsider anti-establishment stance of the movement opposition even when they are the party in power. They thus constitute a distinct mode of relating movement and party logics that poses a serious threat to democratic politics, pluralistic civil society, and to constitutional democracies generally.
To make this case, I discuss social movements as a specific form of politically oriented contentious collective action. (1) I then turn to political parties and the standard understanding of their functions in constitutional democracies. I discuss the recent transformations of political parties since the 1980s in the West. My interest is in how these changes (among other factors) provide the political opportunity structure for populist electoral movements and leaders to emerge and come to power. (2) I then present an ideal type of populism (3) and analyse why populist movement party relations exacerbate extremist polarization and strengthen the affinity of populism in power with authoritarianism. I conclude by reflecting on what might be democracy-enhancing movement party relations for the 21st century. (4)
1 Social movements: Their logic and limits
The 20th century ushered in mass politics in Western democracies. As Dahl noted, there are three ideal typical modes of articulating collective political interests and aims in a democracy: interest groups, political parties and social movements. 12 Interest groups seek influence, lobbying and bargaining with politicians, offering information, money, persuasion and credible threats regarding electoral support. When they seek influence over those in power over the long term, they invest in organizational structure, develop a chain of command and a division of labour among professional lobbyists, and so on. 13 Political parties are organizations that aim to get control of government through competitive elections, to wield the state’s authoritative political power to make collectively binding decisions. Their function is to mobilize, represent voters and govern. 14 Social movements, in contrast to both parties and interest groups, are typically networks of protest groups engaged in non-institutionalized forms of contentious collective action with the goal of social transformation. 15 Like parties, they aggregate interests and mobilize large masses of people and committed supporters in pursuit of a collective purpose, but do so outside the ordinary channels of political communication, and without organizing to win elections to enter government. Like interest groups, they may speak for specific group concerns but insofar as they are political they endorse ends that can become binding for the wider community.
I focus on the shifting relations between movements and parties and the impact of populist logic on them. The types of social movements that matter in this regard are those that are political in a specific sense, namely their means of collective action can be recognized as legitimate and their ends can become binding for the wider community. 16 The distinctiveness of social protest movements is that they engage in contentious politics, purporting to articulate generalizable interpretations of values and aims, needs, and interests of groups in social change that political parties have allegedly failed to adequately represent.
The literature on the ‘new social movements’ of the 1960s and 1970s is enlightening in this regard. 17 Viewing movements as a normal part of democratic politics, analysts were able to specify their specific locus, stakes, logic, dynamics, strengths and weaknesses. The locus classicus of social movements is civil society where they are born as voluntary associations and mobilize to challenge unjust ‘private’ and public power. 18 Indeed the emergence of electoral politics and of popular participation in national politics, and the grant of legality to electoral associations and assemblies provided a claim to legality for associations and assemblies that were not electoral along with the rights to publicize, demonstrate, assemble and so on. Put differently, democratic electoral party politics became an incentive to social movements to operate in civil society and select action repertoires like the demonstration, the strike, boycotts or sit-ins not controlled by political parties. 19 Whether one stresses the strategic aspects of social movements oriented to the pursuit of collective interests by looking into the political opportunity structure, resource mobilization, choice of frames (Tilly et al.); their symbolic dimensions (orientation to visibility and contestation of norms and interpretations of shared values (Touraine, Melucci); or on the identity-oriented dimensions of social movements seeking recognition, autonomy and revalorization of their status in society (Pizzorno) thereby fostering reflexivity about the creation of collective identities, it is clear that the stakes of social movements must be understood both as defensive and offensive. 20 Social movements and countermovements construe the cultural models, norms and institutions of civil society as key stakes of social conflict. They defend society in Polanyi’s sense from the predations of market and against administrative logics (Habermas’ colonization thesis) but are proactive in that they develop the communicative infrastructure of social life, potentially leading to the reinterpretation of social identities and norms in egalitarian and inclusive direction but also generating countermovements against such interpretations. 21
While their quintessential locus is civil society, movements have a specific political logic and relationship to institutional party politics and the state: the politics of influence. Movements don’t organize to stand for election, enter parliament and govern. They are not political parties. Instead they seek to influence those political organizations that do form governments and exercise authoritative political power. Their mode of organizing is indicative of their distinctive logic of influence: it is informal, ad hoc, discontinuous, context-sensitive and often egalitarian. 22 They don’t develop highly differentiated organizational structures, they typically have rudimentary membership rules, staffs, programmes, and tend to avoid membership dues, relying instead on donations, networks and voluntarism, and they often (but not always) favour participatory as opposed to plebiscitary forms of interaction. 23
The representative function of social movements is different from that of political parties. Although they do articulate ends and norms that can become binding for the wider community, they rely on other organizations (parties) to mediate these into authoritative collectively binding decisions. Since they seek to influence, not exercise institutionalized political power, they are freed from the responsibilities of governing and are under little pressure to temper their demands. Indeed movements tend to frame their concerns and ends in principled non-negotiable terms and in moralistic antinomies: yes/no, them/us, the desirable and the intolerable. 24 While all movements contain fundamentalist purist wings as well as more ‘realist’, ‘self-limiting’ ones, the former tend to be louder. 25 Accordingly, their relation to political parties and opponents is unlike that of interest groups or other parties. Offe argues that they are incapable of negotiating or bargaining because they cannot make credible commitments on behalf of those they ‘represent’ or speak for. They lack the relevant properties of formal organizations, such as the internal binding-ness of representative decisions by virtue of which formal organizations ensure the terms of the political deal will be honoured. 26 This in addition to the high moralistic value and priority ascribed by movements to their demands renders compromise both difficult and potentially self-defeating.
Yet no social movement can sustain militancy on a society-wide basis in the long term. They thus face a tri-lemma of mutually exclusive options. 27 They can (a) organize as a separate political party; (b) stay neutral between the major parties, retain autonomy and act as a pressure group; or (c) ally with an existing party to gain influence within it. 28 Choices depend on a variety of factors, not least of which is the electoral system and the shape, strength and efficacy of existing political parties. It is notoriously difficult to form a third party in first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system of the United States. In European proportional representation (PR) systems, new parties have more success. But it is also clear that movements acting as pressure groups while remaining neutral between the dominant parties risk having a too limited influence on the political system. But it is equally so that existing parties may pre-empt and co-opt movement demands that have a wide appeal if they think it means winning votes. Since my interest is in populist movement party logics, I focus on the first two options: the formation of alliances by movements entering into an existing party, and the formation by movements of a new political party.
II Political parties: Their function and transformation
As E.E. Schattschneider famously wrote, ‘…political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties…the condition of the parties is the best possible evidence of the nature of any regime’. 29 Political parties are Janus-faced. They emerge in civil society as voluntary associations but become the key actors in political society oriented towards winning elections and taking power. In power, parties temporarily become part of the state. Their logic in a democracy is thus the logic of power: attaining it (electorally), and exercising it by making collectively binding decisions. The three core functions of parties in a democracy are to represent civil society, to mediate between it and the state and to govern. Under the first category, we can place the roles of political parties in mobilizing the citizenry by articulating and aggregating interests, and translating these into public policies thereby mediating between civil society and the state. 30 The competitive struggle for the vote implies the representative function of integrating various groups into the political process by being responsive to their needs and helping to articulate their diverse demands. Indeed aggregating diverse but related interests into broad programmes was one of the key tasks of the traditional mass party. 31 Political parties channel conflict into competition for office. Qua the procedural tasks of governing, the classical idea is that parties recruit and promote political leaders, organize the legislature, the government and key institutions of the state. 32 They staff public offices and socialize potential political leaders within their organizational apparatuses wherein they generate suitable candidates and nominees. Responsibilities in government have to be allocated across different departments and require disciplined support in the legislature, often through negotiations or in coalitions with other parties. In presidential or semi-presidential systems, parties also staff legislative committees, organize legislative procedures and everyday agreements on legislative agenda. 33 This requires willingness to collaborate and compromise with the opposition or with minority parties. Accordingly, party competition and party government in a well-functioning democracy entails acknowledgement and acceptance of plurality, alternation, the legitimacy of the opposition, willingness to compromise, self-limitation and self-restraint although this taming of conflict does not rule out polarization or radical partisan positions regarding even constitutional change. 34 At stake is a political democratic ethics: willingness to compromise (accept the good at the expense of the best), a disposition to tolerate or welcome diversity in order to be in the majority, respect for minority rights, and a certain comprehensiveness so that a party in power can claim to have earned the approval of ‘the great body of the people’. Majoritarianism in this sense involves an ethics of partisanship. As Rosenblum notes, all this evokes ‘…a semblance of mutual respect, minimal concern for the interests and opinions of others, provisionality, and resolving disputes through argument’. 35
A. The hollowing out of parties
We left the classic epoch of mass parties long ago and the shifts in party type and in the political environment have led to the ‘hollowing out’ and ‘movement-ization’ of political parties in both Western Europe and in the United States, undermining their ability to perform their classic functions. 36 The major party types have been parties of notables, the mass party, the catch-all party and recently the cartel party. Parties of notables were made up of social elites with enough money, leisure and reputation to be able to devote themselves to politics. This party type dominated prior to the democratization of the franchise in Europe and the United States. Mass parties emerged in Europe in the early 20th century with the elimination of property qualifications for the vote and the availability of new voters needing to be integrated into the electoral system. In the United States, mass parties emerged in the early 19th century. 37 In Western Europe, mass membership parties were tantamount to closed political and social communities composed of collectivities of citizens defined in terms of occupation, working and living conditions and religious practices. Social segmentation and deep partisan polarization along these lines was cemented by active organizational intervention by parties that helped construct networks of partisan loyalties and to anchor them in affiliated associations and lifeworlds in civil society ranging from trade unions and churches to social clubs and youth organizations. 38 Put differently, mass parties were organized into hierarchically structured party sections that penetrated civil society locally and fostered coherent ideological partisan political identities and collective identification around common values, solidarities and party loyalties. 39 Social closure, organizational intervention and encapsulation anchored the new mass parties in civil society. 40 Mass parties thus developed close linkages with a specific social base, and deemed representational integrity a priority – constituting the political voice of their constituencies.
As Kirchheimer famously argued, the post-Second World War period saw the rise of the catch-all party – a form that weakened the linkages of parties with a specific social base in civil society and watered down ideological appeals targeting specific classes, in attempt to gain wider electoral appeal. 41 The catch-all party began to expand the power of party leaders at the expense of the rank and file, and focused on increasing generalized electoral support garnered through the use of marketing and communication experts. Organizational efforts turned away from the integration and socialization of its members. The representative function of the catch-all party was altered, insofar as representational integrity of the respective segmented civil society groups became secondary to winning elections by wooing voters across traditional cleavages. 42 This development reflected and furthered the lessening of social segmentation and polarization of both civil and political society in the post-war constellation. Indeed once could depict the rise of the catch-all party as the Americanization of the Western European party system.
In Western Europe, the step from the catch-all party to the rise of the ‘cartel party’ occurred over the last decades of the 20th century. 43 It reflects changes in party competition, party organization, shifts in weights among core party functions, and the increasing role of media and actors outside the party hierarchy in affecting and reorienting party politics. Organizationally the key change pertains to the recruitment of party leaders and candidates: while candidates and leaders may still require the party label, the choice depends increasingly on a candidate’s appeal to the wider electorate and via the media, to actors outside the party hierarchy. Cartel parties offer even less clear programmatic, ideological and policy choices to voters than their catch-all predecessors. They further diminish the representative function in favour of the governmental one. The erosion of their social roots, their increasing distance from civil society and their greater involvement in government and the state render them less critical, less willing to play the role of strong opposition and less receptive to the demands, and voices of civil society. The tendency towards inter-party elite collusion is striking, as is the increasing personalization of leadership, focus on the electoral moment, and on spectacle, image and playing to the audience. The party organizational infrastructure outside the government and the party on the ground, in civil society, tends, gradually, to wither away. 44 These features of the ‘cartel party type’ have led analysis to speak of the hollowing out of parties, a feature of US parties as well. 45 I hesitate to adopt the term ‘cartel party’ to describe American parties, because a central feature of the cartel party is the interpenetration of party and state evidenced by the role of public resources and funding obviously missing in the United States. 46 Accordingly, the cartel party shifts its locus from civil society to the state. Put differently, the Janus face of political parties has become increasingly one-sided with much greater emphasis on becoming part of government and far less connection to or rootedness in civil society organizationally or in terms of representative function. Yet the term ‘hollow party’ is apt for trends in both geographic areas. 47 In the United States, too, parties are no longer robust presences in civil society on the local or regional level and they too seem decreasingly able to police their boundaries. Their funding comes not from the state but from wealthy donors or from myriad small donors not tied to the party organization or membership. 48 Thus despite their differences, hollow parties in the United States and Western Europe have become shallow, opportunistic electoral organizations of elites, dependent on the personal charisma of the candidates seeking to control the legislature and the government (Schumpeter’s vision) competing primarily over who wins, not over representing the interests, views or needs of civil society groups or any general vision, programme or ideology.
The hollowing out of parties and their elite politics constitutes the political opportunity structure for populist emergence and success: be it via the capture of an existing political party (as in the United States) or by forming new populist movement parties (Europe). The current populist wave did not create the hollowing out of parties or what is their ‘movement-ization’. But the populist movement parties and/or leaders have capitalized on these developments.
B. The ‘movement-ization’ of parties
Over a decade ago, Herbert Kitschelt developed the concept of movement party to capture the specific links between the logic of movement and party, in a distinctive party form that emerged in the aftermath of the rise of the catch-all party and the new social movements. Movement parties are a distinctive hybrid party type involving ‘coalitions of political activists who emanate from social movements and try to apply the organizational and strategic practices of social movements in the arena of party competition’. 49 Typically they coalesce around salient issues and groups that remain unrepresented by the existing conventional political parties: omissions that enable their ambitious political entrepreneurs to enter the electoral arena. Like social movements, they lack extensive and intensive formal organizational structure (staff, offices, etc.) and have low-cost open membership. They tend not to develop an internal hierarchical structure with designated organs and officers with authority to make binding decisions and commitments on behalf of the party. 50 Nevertheless they are electoral actors competing in democratic elections and seeking political power.
Importantly, movement parties need not originate in social protest movements. Kitschelt applies his conceptual analysis of movement parties both to ecological parties that did emerge from such movements and to far right-wing parties (including populist ones) that did not. What matters in the movement party, as a hybrid form, is the adoption of movement logic, organizational models and tactics while competing electorally. Some movement parties may be hierarchical and loyal to a charismatic leader, others may insist on ‘direct’ participatory democracy. 51 It is their lack of investment in problem-solving (regarding collective action and social choice), their fluid organizational structure, the instability of collective decision-making, and the informality and fluidity of membership alongside insistence in maintaining purist absolutist and oppositional stances that is key to the movement party form. In short, the movement party merges the logic of movements with the logic of parties, tendentially perverting both the representational and governing functions of parties and undercutting the self-limiting, democracy-expanding role of social movements.
But, Kitschelt sees movement parties as transitional phenomena precisely due to their contradictory hybrid features that combine movement and party logics in ways that render them unstable. At work here is not Michels’ iron law, whereby self-interested party leaders allegedly abandon the interests of their principles. 52 Rather it is the logic of effective inter-party competition and the demands of governing responsibly in liberal and pluralist constitutional democracies, that push movement parties either to transition into more standard party forms, to decline, or to devolve back into social movements. Kitschelt describes a range of institutional incentives and contextual conditions that may induce politicians in movement parties to move away from the profile regarding organizational structure, fundamentalist stances and anti-establishment anti-party postures. But he does not foresee the movement party becoming a hegemonic or dominant form in constitutional democracies and apparently assumes that if it succeeds in acquiring a legislative majority and control over government, it could hardly resist the pressures to turn into a more ordinary political party.
The other prominent form of movement-ization of parties is via ‘alliance’ – by virtue of which a movement becomes a faction within the overall party n and uses its influence inside the party to push its agenda. This is the dominant version in the United States. Social movements can become ‘anchoring groups’ within a political party, reshaping its long-term trajectories in ideological and policy development. 53 When parties are strong, the party leaders and pragmatists remain the gatekeepers and although they lose some autonomy vis-à-vis the new faction, the anchoring movement gives up much more autonomy, insofar as it must de-radicalize, shed the more fundamentalist adherents, ideological purism, forgoing autonomous action and in short, renouncing ‘the best’ in favour of the good. 54 Party group alliance and incorporation accordingly elevates group moderates permitting the party to continue to appeal to the median voter, over time. The party thereby gains important resources (time, money, access to networks) and votes while movements get results aligned with their norms and ideologies. 55 The incorporation of movements into a party as an anchoring group can lead to major realignments, and major transformations of the orientation and development of political parties. The classic example is the labour movement and the Democratic Party alliance forged during the New Deal.
Such alliances can, however, in the case of weak catch-all parties, help to hollow them out, especially if movement factions push through institutional reforms inside the party that allow them to retain their movement features. Rising movements typically generate countermovements that in turn might seek to ally with a different party. This is allegedly what happened in the aftermath of the rise of the civil rights movement, its embrace by LBJ and the Democratic Party, and the White backlash generated in the South triggering presidential challenges mounted by Wallace in 1964 and 1968, and then Nixon’s infamous successful southern strategy. The result was a general party realignment that turned the South Republican. 56 But it is not only realignment that the countermovement of racist segregationists triggered in response to the civil rights movement’s embrace by the Democratic Party. The movement–countermovement dynamic also created centrifugal pressures leading parties to reassess the strategy of appealing to the median voter. 57 Equally important was the internal transformation of both political parties in the context of the anti-war movement, the ‘silent revolution’ that took place between 1968 and 1972. 58 In an effort to democratize the nomination process for political candidates, to get away from the smoky back-room deals and to strip state party elites of their control over delegate selection to presidential nominating conventions, activists involved in the McGovern–Fraser reform project for the Democratic Party succeeded in creating the new primary (or caucus) system. They did so by invoking ‘the people’ hoping to create a strong active institutionalized party that might render parties more inclusive and responsive to the citizenry while avoiding Michels’ iron law. 59 The unintended consequences of these reforms apparently were the empowerment of radical minorities and the movement wings of both parties, extremist polarization and the shift of party orientation and appeals away from the median voter in favour of ‘playing to the base’. 60 This fostered the hollowing out of the parties as party elites and state parties lost control over delegate selection, local and state-level party organizations atrophied, movement activists inside and outside the party became dominant, and other outsiders including funding sources, think tanks, super pacs, talk show hosts and new interactive media actors disorganized the space parties once occupied and replaced the party organization as the key actors generating electoral candidates. Many have questioned whether ‘letting the people decide’ by means of binding primaries and caucuses is really tantamount to democratization. Some stress the evisceration of political equality that occurs when radicals take over the primaries (low general turnout and high turnout of extremists being typical) and push the parties to embrace ever more extreme ideological positions. 61 The new media and fundraising environments also drew people and resources away from state and local party organizations leaving them as hollow money conduits or get out the vote orchestrators before elections. 62 Typically this is characterized as polarization. But it is also true that on economic issues, both parties moved to the centre-right since the mid-1980s embracing neo-liberal austerity politics in place of the older great society new deal welfare state politics of an earlier epoch.
The hollowing out and movement-ization of the American political party, like the European counterpart, albeit thanks to different mechanisms, created the political opportunity structure for populists to capture and/or displace traditional parties. It set the stage for the rise of ‘affective party political polarization’ and a form of segmental pluralism and stacked political social identities that map onto a friend/enemy logic undermining rather than inclusively democratizing parties or the political system. 63
Contemporary populism did not cause the hollowing out or movement-ization of political parties. 64 But it exacerbates these trends and is incapable of avoiding or tempering them. Indeed populist political entrepreneurs have created a new type of movement party – the digital/platform party – that seeks to fully absorb the party into the movement form. 65 Digital technology is constitutive of both the organizational structure (enabling mass decisional participation) and political ideology (egalitarian ‘unmediated’ direct democracy) of populist platform parties. The project is to dissolve the very distinctions between movement and party, civil and political society, masses and elites. While all parties can use the new digital technology and media as additional means of communicating with voters, the entire life of the populist digital party is apparently rearranged around the digital media, modelled on the ways movements operate. They have many of the features of earlier movement parties including low or cost free entry, lack of steady funding and absence of hierarchical offices, intermediary cadre and so on. Populist digital/platform parties boast of dispensing with the middleman (party bureaucracy) and of conducting online referenda to involve members in direct decision-making, rejecting representation within the party (and implicitly in the state). It is, of course, questionable whether decision-making in digital parties actually entails higher quality democracy, the equal worth of every voice, radical decentralization or the absence of intermediation. 66 Many studies show that what actually emerges on the ground are new forms of ‘distributed centralization’, hyper-leaders (who claim to embody the party movement), reactive democracy insofar as media savvy experts are the ones who set up the codes, direct the albeit invisible organizational strategies from behind the scenes and frame the choices that the membership supposedly decides on. 67 What we see typically in the digital populist parties is a ‘reactive’ base allied to a charismatic leader who with a small entourage has the power of initiative, and deploys plebiscitary strategies mapped onto the alleged egalitarian participatory digital mechanisms. My point is not that the digital social media perforce lead to plebiscitary forms of leadership democracy. Rather it is that the populist versions of the digital movement party – perforce drive in the direction of pseudo-democracy.
Thanks to its specific logic, populism fosters the worst version of movement party relationships, turning alliance into capture of the party by the movement, and ultimately by populist political entrepreneurs (US Republican Party capture first by the Tea Party and then by Trump) or generating movement parties that once in power do not transition into standard parties but continue to embrace and exaggerate their movement aspects including extremist anti-establishment rhetoric, affective political polarization. The tendency of populists in power is to maintain a tight identity with their base and movement stance, thereby perverting both the logic of power and the logic of influence and undermining the proper democratic functioning of both movements and parties. They thus exacerbate the undermining of political equality and the illiberal trends that the hollowing out and movement-ization of parties fosters.
III Populist logic
I am aware of the debate over different conceptual approaches to populism variously labelled discourse-theoretic, strategic, ideational, socio-economic and stylistic, each of which prioritizes one dimension over and typically at the expense of the others. 68 Populism is a polemical and essentially contested concept. 69 Nevertheless we need a coherent ideal type of populism to help us critically analyse and assess theories and practices that are labelled populist. An ideal type is useful for differentiating among the authoritarian proclivities and threats in populist movements, populist party movements, populist governments and regimes.
Populist discourse pits ‘the people’ against the establishment – parties and elites – invoking the need of the former to recuperate their democratic popular sovereignty from the latter, who have allegedly usurped it. As such it is a thin ideology involving anti-establishment rhetoric, anti-status quo stances and redemptive Manichaean framing. 70 As a strategy the aim is to create a unified ‘collective subject’ – ‘the people’ – with a collective will, by erecting a chain of equivalences among heterogeneous demands around a ‘hegemonic signifier’ articulated by a leader with whom they identify and who claims to embody their will. 71 This entails constructing a frontier between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but the ‘them’ is never only the establishment – it invariably includes the parts of the population unallied with the populist party movement who may be stigmatized as elites, or outsiders or as undeserving populations coddled by elites. The strategic goal is to attain and maintain political power electorally, based on mass mobilization of heterogeneous strata embracing a unitary collective identity. Leaders emphasize direct ‘unmediated’ personalistic linkages to their ‘base’ of heterogeneous supporters constructed as ‘the people’. Often, political organizing entails personal electoral vehicles with low levels of institutionalization that fits with the outsider stance of populist leaders. 72 Social movements deploying populist rhetoric and tropes can emerge autonomously in civil and economic society and prioritize horizontal participation, inclusion and social rights. They can also morph into populist electoral vehicles when a top-down mobilization strategy is superimposed on them by a leader who begins to emphasize personalistic and plebiscitarian elements to broaden his electoral appeal. 73 Strategies of mobilization can shift; populist leaders can use several simultaneously. 74 But populism’s political logic entails the construction of opposed social identities and affective political polarization mapped onto strongly segmented political identifications. Indeed, populism involves a pars pro toto logic that extracts the true people, the authentic majority, the ‘real’ sovereign, from the rest of the population and from the elites. It is thus invariably linked to a friend/enemy conception of politics. As a style, populism involves the performative enactment of the habitus of ‘the people’ – ordinary folk – by political leaders claiming to incarnate their unity and identity. Populist leaders are thus able to pose as the opposition, and inveigh against the establishment, even when they are in power – always warning about some plot (by the deep state, journalists, etc.) requiring vigilance and ever-expanding, discretionary and ultimately permanent power. The populist leader refuses differentiation of the party, the movement and the state even when in power and rejects the principle of self-limitation regarding institutions, majorities, other parties and other social movements. Populists in power typically exhibit hostility to the institutions of constitutional democracy (the separation and division of powers, courts enforcing the rule of law, the autonomous administration of justice, etc.): hence their eagerness to ‘reform’ whatever institutions might allow opponents to win office or limit executive power and their invocation of ‘the people’s will and welfare’ as justification . Yet populism depends on a host ideology for content and moral substance because populism is not a specific ideology and ‘the people’ is not a specific class or social category (nor is ‘the elite’) – it is, a floating signifier.
IV The affinity with authoritarianism
It should be obvious why populist versions of the movement party are a symptom but hardly the right cure for the crisis of political representation, and why they have a strong affinity, once in power, with competitive authoritarianism de-democratization. Populist strategy involves a type of identity politics that plays on affect, fosters strong cathected political identifications, deeply segmented and stacked political identities, personalizing disagreement, making it hard to discuss or work across frontiers. When a logic of affective party polarization and negative partisanship is tied to the creation of a frontier so that one part of the population is deemed ‘the people’, the true majority, then those outside this identity are excised from the people, as adversaries but always also potential antagonists and enemies.
75
The pars pro rhetoric and friend/enemy logic means populists cannot accept the legitimacy of other parties for it claims to embody the authentic people and their unitary will. Populist electoral vehicles are unwilling to become self-limiting even when they cross the threshold of power. The danger is the importation of populist movement strategy, discourse and logic into the commanding heights of government. Digital populist ‘platform’ parties exacerbate this logic.
76
In power, populist movement parties become hostile to autonomous civil society movements since these belie their claim of incarnating the people. While populist movements can foster inclusion for out-groups, the populist dynamic pushes towards ‘counter capture’ of once autonomous movements by the party in power turning them into their base, which they mobilize when needed. All populisms entail an anti-establishment stance and the need to maintain outsider status even when in power. This generates hostility towards other parties and institutionalized counter powers (independent judicial and administrative agencies, established professional credentialled media, etc.) typically labelled ‘liberal’ although these are also democratic. If a populist leader captures a party, the tendency is to further hollow it out, undermining its organizational structures, elites and hierarchies by bypassing them through other sources of funding and direct appeals to ‘the base’ or the movement via the media.
77
At issue is not ordinary realignment but reshaping the party system to undermine party discipline, dispense with the party hierarchy and replace them with their own clients. This too propels them in an authoritarian direction. Due to the congenital weakness of populism – the fickleness of its mass base – populist leaders in government typically attempt to re-centralize, personalize and concentrate power, embracing plebiscitary mechanisms to reaffirm continuously the claim that they embody the people while.
78
It’s important to distinguish between populism as a movement, a party, and a government and as a regime. The authoritarian logic only implicit in populist movements and movement parties invariably asserts itself once populist leaders gain governmental power, if they retain their populist stance.
79
Since they attain power as political outsiders with the expressed goal of destroying the political establishment, portrayed as corrupt and undemocratic, populist leaders have no commitment to existing democratic institutions or norms. Populist leaders in control of government invariably claim a mandate to ‘re-found’ the political system by altering the constitutional order so as to strengthen executive power, undermine mechanisms of legal and horizontal accountability, and reduce the ability of courts or parliaments to challenge their power grabs and unfair uses.
80
In part because they cling to their movement logic, they tend to conflate constituent with constituted power (their electoral mandate), undermining both democracy and constitutionalism. Elections are still held, as democratic legitimacy is crucial to the populist leader purporting to restore real democracy and sovereignty to the people. But in such contexts, institutions ranging from electoral authorities, the judiciary, independent media and security forces are manipulated so as to weaken opponents.
81
Hence the term, ‘competitive authoritarianism’. Thus populist governments face a catch-22: they are based on democratic electoral legitimacy yet they cannot ‘legitimately’ lose an election since they purport to embody the voice and will of the authentic people – the true majority. But once they control the state it becomes decreasingly convincing to blame the deep state or outside forces for electoral losses.
Thus, populist logic in and out of power refuses self-limitation and fosters dedifferentiation of civil and political society, party and movement, power and influence and so on, exhibiting an affinity with monism and authoritarianism rather than with more inclusive and pluralized institutional forms of democratization. Not alliance, but capture is the true logic of populist movement party relations. Instead of de-radicalizing once in power, movement parties end up de-democratizing the party political system and the polity as a whole.
V Democracy-reinforcing movement party relations: An incomplete conclusion
Attempts to democratize parties so that they resemble the open, fluid participatory structure of movements, or attempts to bypass them through referenda, plebiscites or digital platforms in the name of returning sovereignty to the people, are examples of the overextension of movement logic into the party political sphere of power, that invariably end up undermining the party forms that make democracy work and ultimately substitute new elites, clientelism and plebiscitary mechanisms for both formal and ‘participatory’ democracy. 82 But we must take seriously the populist critiques of closed party political systems, of growing inequality and welfare deficits (oligarchy) in advanced capitalist societies, and lack of social solidarity with those suffering from political choices tied to neo-liberal modes of hyper-globalization. 83
The question for non-populist resistance movements and parties is what form of movement party relations and what structures in political society and government can foster real inclusion, democratization, social solidarity and responsiveness without undermining the achievements of constitutional democracy. The crisis of political representation is real and populists thrive when political elites become closed off and isolated from civil society, when established parties fail to be receptive to legitimate demands, do not articulate the relevant issues and fall short on both substantive (regarding welfare, solidarity, social and economic injustice) and procedural (inadequate mechanisms for democratic inclusion voice and efficacy) levels.
The right way for parties to relate to movements is to be differentiated from them yet open to including new actors, new needs and new demands into their organization and programmes while maintaining their structure. It is especially important to re-people local party offices and cadre to foster awareness of, communication with and receptivity to local voices. Parties have to reconnect with, aggregate, frame and represent civil society interests, and to govern in a responsible way, pursuing programmes that meet most of the voters’ interests most of the time. 84 This would entail a shift away from populism and a responsible embrace of the differentiation between civil and political society, between the logic of influence and the logic of power, self-limitation, and the intent to govern for all not just for some, albeit in ways that reflect partisan interpretations of projects and goals. I have long argued that social movements are essential to democracy and that political parties need to develop sensors making them receptive and responsive to progressive, inclusive democratizing movements that develop in civil society. Critiques of entrenched elites, oligarchic practices, clientelism and corruption are all part of democracy. But the democratic game fosters the circulation of elites, generates new elites and aims at making political processes more inclusive, representative, democratic and just. It does not however aim to abolish the very existence of cultural, political social or economic elites – this sort of levelling fosters the Pol Pots of the world, not democratization, and populist rhetoric on that score is dangerous indeed. So what is needed in part is the pressure of democratizing social movements and resistance to both right- and left-wing populisms and to neo-liberal austerity politics, along with projects to reinvigorate and regenerate political parties from the ground up, perhaps creating new avenues for democratic participation that supplement but don’t purport to replace existing ones.
The anti-Trump resistance movements in the United States and the efforts of ‘indivisible’ to revive the Democratic Party are instructive in this regard. As is well known, the Tea Party that prepared the way for Trump’s capture of the Republican Party was an electorally sparked right-wing populist movement (a reaction to Obama’s election) with AstroTurf support, that evolved after 2009 into national and local organizing efforts that magnified conservative and extremist electoral clout and remade while further hollowing out the Republican Party. 85 We know also that this resulted in asymmetric polarization: shifting the Republican Party to the far right regarding economic, race religion, guns, gender and immigration issues and opening it up to populist capture by Trump. Luckily, the Democratic Party did not undergo a parallel shift, and it should not. 86 The Trumpian Republican Party now slavishly appeals to the extremist base rather than to the median voter, while the President maintains his anti-establishment movement posture in ways that aim to disempower all counter powers, discredit the opposition and fire up his movement base. The Democratic Party remains a broad coalition of interest groups with many moderates and a variety of movement factions competing and allying inside it. In short, the Democratic Party has not been taken over by populists either in the form of movements or political entrepreneurs, nor has it endorsed populist logic or rhetoric. 87 Yet it has also been hollowed out and requires reinvention.
Anti-Trump resistance movements proliferating today, like their Tea Party counterparts are forming groups outside and inside the Democratic Party. 88 I argue that the non-populist character of these movements makes all the difference although the jury is still out on how the tensions between left radicals and moderates will play out over the coming presidential election. The real question is whether the grass-roots activists trying to penetrate and reinvigorate the Democratic Party on local, state and national levels are concerned with making it more progressive while rebuilding and revitalizing the party as a political party, so that it can win elections, represent and govern adequately or whether they want to mimic the Tea Party activists, further movement-ize the Democratic Party and render the polarization of the parties symmetric: left versus right. Certainly the success of the party in the congressional elections of 2018 speaks for its internal pluralism, openness yet tolerance of diversity on local and regional levels. In this regard, it is interesting to note that many of the anti-Trump grass-roots groups span a wide range from centrist to far left, and that outreach is directed towards middle-of-the-road fellow citizens and even disaffected republicans on the part of members of Indivisible movement at least. 89 To be sure there are many groups that embrace socialist rhetoric and radical left identity policies and they play an important role in changing the discourse and opening up the party and the population to new ideas. But more, so far, important none of the relevant anti-Trump resistance movements are populist and none embrace the pars pro toto or friend/enemy logic that populism articulates.
Whether the resistance movements (countermovements to the Tea Party and Trump populists) will revitalize the Democratic Party by filling its ranks and rebuilding local and state-level organizational structures more open to the input of marginalized voices and becoming perhaps anchoring movements willing to accept compromise and trade-offs, or whether there will be a more radical set of resistance movements that push the party to the left while retaining movement purist stances remains to be seen. Clearly in my view, symmetric polarization is not the right answer to asymmetric polarization, nor is left populism the correct response to right-wing populism as both tend to eviscerate constitutional democracy.