Activist Parties and Hybrid Party Behaviours: A Typological Reassessment of Partisan Mobilisation
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920952000 |
| Author | Alejandro M Peña |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929920952000
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(4) 637 –655
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929920952000
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Activist Parties and Hybrid
Party Behaviours: A
Typological Reassessment of
Partisan Mobilisation
Alejandro M Peña
Abstract
Integrating insights from party politics, social movement and political communication literatures,
with a qualitative discussion of hybrid party behaviours observable in different contexts and
regions, the article offers an original typology of four models of partisan mobilisation and focuses
on a novel possibility, the activist party. Referring to parties that combine a professionalised
organisation with the deployment of movement-like tactics to achieve electoral goals, the article
points to current resources reducing the organisational trade-offs previously assumed to restrict
the combination of electoral appeal with partisan militancy. Through this argument, the article
challenges the thesis that under democratic conditions political parties should be expected to
abandon outsider strategies for insider ones, while providing an analytical account of emerging
patterns of organisational innovation and partisan behaviour being witnessed in contemporary
party politics.
Keywords
political parties, movement parties, social movements, social media, populism
Accepted: 31 July 2020
Introduction
Though claims that the mediating function of political parties is being eroded are not new,
concerns have accentuated in the last years given the success of populist parties and can-
didates from beyond the establishment, and a discernible tendency for partisan campaigns
to be framed in movement-like terms: as representing excluded sectors of the population
or as alternatives to conventional political ideologies and elites. These tendencies are
noticeable in a variety of contexts: from outsider figures reaching power in the United
States, Brazil and Ukraine, to the success of populist, radical and new movement parties
Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK
Corresponding author:
Alejandro M Peña, Department of Politics, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: alejandro.pena@york.ac.uk
952000PSW0010.1177/1478929920952000Political Studies ReviewPeña
research-article2020
Article
638 Political Studies Review 19(4)
across Europe, to effective conservative party-civil society alliances in South America.
These developments have stimulated not only a new round of debate about the decay of
liberal democracy, the rise of populism and the dangers of protest politics, but growing
arguments pointing to the ‘hybridisation’ of party behaviours, combining electoral appeal
with extra-institutional mobilisation (Gerbaudo, 2019; Krastev, 2016; Kriesi, 2014;
Mudde, 2016).1
These hybrid behaviours challenge conventional expectations in political science that
as democratic systems consolidate, political parties should abandon outsider tactics for
insider ones, switching from non-institutional repertoires seeking to gain public visibility
and legitimacy to more formal structures to access institutionalised opportunities and gain
the attention of elites (Pettinicchio, 2012). Historically, this expectation resulted from the
evolution of political participation in liberal ‘movement societies’, with parties moving
away from the street and settling within the electoral arena, and social movements becom-
ing the preferred organisational vehicle for contentious claim-making (Hutter et al., 2019;
Meyer and Tarrow, 1998; Tilly, 2004). At the same time, this supported a view where
hybrid party formations, such as movement parties, were considered transient and unsta-
ble forms emerging due to a crisis of representation or ‘linkage failure’, bound to disap-
pear though processes of democratic learning, oligarchisation and incorporation
(Kitschelt, 2006; Lawson, 1988).2
In recent years, however, a growing body of work has challenged the validity of this
thesis, claiming that parties are returning to the contentious arena and/or increasingly act-
ing as social movement actors, prompting that movement-like behaviours are no longer
exclusive to new, weak or outsider parties. Anria (2019: 12), for example, highlighted the
case of the Bolivian MAS, ‘an organizational “anomaly” in comparative politics’, to
argue that movement-based parties can retain movement-like qualities, such as grassroots
input, even after prolonged periods in government. In Europe, Pirro and Castelli Gattinara
(2018) and Della Porta et al. (2017) explored the electoral success of new hybrid anti-
establishment parties, be this on the left (SYRIZA, Podemos), centre (Movimento 5 Stelle
– M5S) or far-right (Jobbik), while examining Green and Pirate parties in Germany and
Sweden, Blings (2018) observed that niche parties can electorally benefit from maintain-
ing programmatic alignment with their social movement roots. In the United States,
Heaney and Rojas (2015) argued that the peace movement effectively acted as the
(Democratic) ‘party in the street’ during Obama’s campaign, while Paul Almeida (2010:
177) used the term ‘social movement partyism’ to describe Latin American parties that
coalesced with social movement causes and use social movement strategies to establish
‘a constituency on issues with widespread opinion support that eventuates in greater
electoral power’.
This article seeks to conceptually integrate and nuance these analyses under a novel
typological framework that considers organisational modalities of partisan mobilisation.
While party typologies are abundant in the literature, and can result in conceptual over-
proliferation and stretching, they are useful when they offer heuristically effective catego-
ries to comprehend complex notions and serve as ‘baselines for comparison involving
real-life cases’ (Gunther and Diamond, 2003: 171). The proposed typology aims to do so
by considering the resources political parties can use to engage in conventional electoral
mobilisation or in non-conventional contentious action. By focusing on this resources and
repertoires in a combined manner, this typology clarifies different instances of hybrid
partisan behaviour often discussed under overlapping and often loaded designations –
that is, new politics parties, challenger parties, movement parties, populist parties,
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