Party systems, electoral systems and social movements

Hanspeter Kriesi

‘Instead of attempting to exterminate all political forms, organizations, and alignments that do

not qualify as pressure groups, would it not be better to attempt to make a synthesis, covering

the whole political system and finding a place for all kind of political life’ (E.E.

Schattschneider 1960[1988]. The Semi-sovereign People, London: Wadsworth, p. 38)

The Schattschneider quote I use as an introduction here was directed against the American

group theorists who saw pressure groups everywhere, but did not have the parties on their

conceptual screen. When reading this quote, I was reminded of social movement scholars who

tend to see movements everywhere, but do not connect them to political parties. In the

political process approach, of course, political parties enter the fray as part of the political

environment of social movements. That is, political parties are part of the alliance and conflict

structure in which social movements are embedded. The party system, in turn, is seen as

shaped by the institutional structure, most importantly, by the electoral system, which

determines to a large extent the number and orientation of the parties available as possible

allies of the social movements. What the social movement literature has tended to overlook is

that political parties are linked to social movements not only as possible allies, but in more

fundamental ways as well. This does not necessarily mean that we should put aside Tilly’s

enormously influential polity model, which has introduced a separation of movement politics

from institutionalized politics by distinguishing between social movements as ‘challengers’

seeking access to the institutionalized realm of politics and ‘polity members’ who already

have such routinized access. It means, however, that the two worlds of inside (institution-

nalized, conventional) and outside (protest, unconventional) politics are not as neatly
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separated as this model suggests to the non-attentive reader. Following Goldstone’s (2003: 2)

lead, we should start from the assumption that ‘social movements constitute an essential

element of normal politics in modern societies, and that there is only a fuzzy and permeable

boundary between institutionalized and non-institutionalized politics’.

On the one hand, in a ‘movement society’, some forms of moderate protest have become part

of the conventional repertoire that is, from time to time, they are also adopted by polity

insiders. With respect to political parties, this means that certain established parties tend to

expand the scope of contest beyond the narrow boundaries of the polity in order to strengthen

their hand inside of the polity. On the other hand, some types of outsiders prefer to articulate

their protest inside of the polity and tend to refrain from mobilizing protest in the streets. With

respect to political parties, this means that some social movements prefer to organize in the

form of political parties, or their cause is coopted and integrated into the program of estab-

lished political parties. My discussion of the relationship between political parties and social

movements starts out with the conventional view of the political process approach by

conceptualizing the parties as part of the political context the configuration of which is

determined by the institutional structure. It then moves on to consider parties as social

movement organizations. Finally, it goes one step further by also taking into account the

effect of social movements on party systems. As I shall argue, some social movements have

the capacity to fundamentally transform individual parties and entire party systems.

Institutional contexts

There are different types of democracies, even if we are only considering established

democracies as I am going to do here, and different typologies to distinguish between these

types. Among comparative political scientists, Lijphart’s (1999) distinction between

majoritarian and consensus democracies has become prevalent, and it is useful to put the
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present discussion in the context of this distinction. Lijphart’s criterion for classifying

democracies is the concentration of political power. Majoritarian democracies concentrate

political power, while consensus democracies divide it. Lijphart’s scheme uses two

dimensions for summarizing how power is divided – the ‘executive-parties’ dimension and

the ‘federalism-centralism’ dimension. For our purposes, his ‘executive-parties’ dimension is

more important. It is characterized by five aspects: the number of parties (two-party systems

vs multiparty systems), the electoral system (majority and plurality methods vs proportional

representation), the concentration of power in the cabinet (single party vs coalition

governments), the executive-legislative relations (dominance by the executive vs balance

between the two), and interest group arrangements (pluralism vs corporatism). The dimension

mixes formal, institutional and informal power arrangements, but the resulting pattern in a

given country is ultimately driven by the electoral system. This means that majoritarian

electoral systems tend to produce two-party systems with single party governments, executive

dominance and interest group pluralism, while proportional systems tend to lead to multiparty

systems with coalition governments, more balanced executive-legislative relations and

interest group coordination (corporatism). The paradigmatic cases are the UK for majoritarian

systems, and Belgium or the Netherlands for consensus systems. Lijphart’s typology is well

suited for parliamentary systems, while presidential systems are more difficult to

accommodate within this framework. On the one hand, presidentialism is an extreme form of

majoritarianism. The classic presidential system of the US is also characterized by a

majoritarian electoral system for the election of Congress, a two-party system, and single

party governments (under the leadership of the President). On the other hand, the American

presidential system divides power between the President and Congress (and a powerful

Judiciary). Moreover, Congress is divided into two equally powerful chambers and the

federalist division of power between the federal government and the state governments,

divides power even more. In other words, the system of checks and balances brings this
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system closer to the consensus system, which is taken into account by Lijphart’s second

dimension.

For our purposes, two aspects of Lijphart’s distinction are crucial: a) in majoritarian systems,

it is much more difficult to successfully create new parties, i.e. access to the political system

via the creation of new parties is rather more closed than in consensual systems. This means

that b), in majoritarian systems, instead of creating his own party, a challenger has a strong

incentive to introduce his demands into the program of one of the existing parties. That is the

capture of existing parties by new challengers is much more likely in majoritarian systems

than in consensus systems, as is the cooptation of such challengers by existing parties.

There is one important exception to this generalization: regional concentration of challenging

minorities and of the corresponding ethnic and nationalist movements. If a challenging group

is regionally concentrated, it can gain political representation by creating its own party even in

a majoritarian system. The reason is that electoral constituencies are territorially defined,

which means that in a given region, a regionally concentrated minority may constitute the

majority and get its representatives elected to the national parliament. In the case of federalist

systems, the party of a national minority may even become the governing party at the regional

level. An example that illustrates this point is the Scottish National Party (SNP), which won a

plurality of seats in the Scottish Parliament for the first time in the 2007 elections, and formed

a minority government with party leader Alex Salmond elected First Minister of Scotland. In

the 2011 general election, the SNP won a landslide victory and was able to form a majority

government in Scotland. Other illustrations include the Catalonian or Basque minorities in

Spain (whose proportional system is rather restrictive due to the small size of the electoral

districts), as well as the many ethnic minorities in India, which are able to rule in their own

state within the Indian federalist system.

Parties as allies

Within this general context, parties can become important allies of social movements, and, as

already pointed out in the introduction, it is this aspect that has above all been on the mind of

scholars adopting the political process approach. According to their line of argument, social

movements expand a given issue-specific conflict in the general public, i.e. they create public

controversy where there was none before, they draw the public’s attention to the issue in

question and frame it in line with their own demands, and, by doing so, they strengthen the

hand of allies of their cause – political parties within the parliamentary arena, interest groups

and public officials within the administrative arena. Protesters on their own, Tarrow (1994:

98) explains, seldom have the power to affect policy priorities of elites. The goal of challen-

gers is, as Wolfsfeld (1997: 29) points out, ‘to generate dissensus among the powerful.

Challengers attempt to make inroads among elites, who represent more legitimate sources for

providing alternative frames’. The expansion of conflict in the public sphere is the general

‘weapon of the weak’ that allows social movements to create political opportunities for elites

– as Tarrow (1994: 98) has observed, not only in the negative sense of repression, but also in

the positive sense when politicians seize the opportunity created by the challengers and

defend their cause within the political system. Parties and their representatives may pick up

the cause of the challengers for opportunistic reasons, as is the case when political entre-

preneurs seize the opportunity created by the challengers to proclaim themselves tribunes of

the people. They may also do so for more substantive or ideological reasons. Viewed from the

party’s perspective, the challenger’s outside mobilization may be a welcome support for the

party’s long-term agenda in a given policy subsystem, which may help the party to undermine

the established policy monopoly in the subsystem in question.

To discuss the possible alliances between parties and social movements more systematically, I

propose two distinctions: we should distinguish between mainstream parties and peripheral
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parties, as well as between government and opposition. Mainstream parties are parties that

habitually govern, and that, even if they are in the opposition, are part of the ‘cartel’ in the

sense of Katz and Mair (1995). These parties are, as Mair (2009) has observed, exposed to an

increasing tension between their role as representatives of the national citizen public, and their

role as responsible governments. As representatives of the national citizen public, they are

expected to be responsive and accountable to their voters; as responsible governments, they

are expected to take into account the increasing number of principals constituted by the many

veto players who now surround the government in its multilevel institutional setting. This

extension of the scope of accountability not only implies that the governing parties’ manoeu-

vring space is reduced, but also and most importantly that their accountability to the national

constituency of voters, i.e. their representative function, is diminished. Peripheral parties,

whose chances to participate in government are slim, are less exposed to such pressures. This

is why, Mair (2011) suggested that we might observe a division of labor between the two

types of parties: on the one side, we have the mainstream parties or the core of the party

system who fulfil the task of responsible government, on the other side, the peripheral parties

which give voice to the people, i.e. which fulfil the representation function and which often

adopt a rather populists style. In other words, Peter Mair (2011: 14) thought that ‘it is possible

to speak of a growing divide in the European party system between parties which claim to

represent, but don’t deliver, and those which deliver, but are no longer seen to represent’. In

other words, Mair suggested that, while mainstream parties may generally be non-accessible

for social movements, the peripheral parties constitute a conduit for popular challenges within

the party system.

Mair’s point applies, of course, only to multiparty systems, and even for these systems, it may

be somewhat overdrawn. On the one hand, even some of the peripheral parties have taken up

government responsibilities and influenced government policy accordingly. This is illustrated

by the fact that some of the challengers from the new populist right have, indeed, participated
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in government (e.g. the SVP in Switzerland, the FPÖ in Austria, the Lega and the PdL in

Italy) or supported minority governments without becoming formal members of governing

coalitions (e.g. the Danish People’s Party, and the Dutch PVV). On the other hand, main-

stream opposition parties are more accessible to outside challengers than members of govern-

ment. This has been one of my arguments for explaining the differential accessibility of the

mainstream left (social democrats) for new social movements in the seventies and eighties of

the last century (Kriesi 1995). More recently, this is also shown by Green-Pedersen and

Mortensen’s (2009) study of agenda-setting by parties in the Danish parliament. As this study

indicates, opposition parties exert greater influence on the party-system agenda than

governing parties, while governing parties are more responsive to the party-system agenda

than opposition parties. Governing parties also directly pick up some of the issues (although

not issues related to the economy) raised by the opposition. That is, indirectly, via the opposi-

tion parties’ influence on the party-system agenda and on the governing parties’ agenda,

challengers may have an influence on the government’s agenda. At least, this applies to a

multiparty system in a consensus democracy like Denmark.

Parties as social movement organizations: the difference between the new left and the

new right

As suggested in the introduction, parties may not only serve as allies of social movements,

social movements may choose to organize themselves in the form of parties in the first place.

That is, social movements may create their own parties (in consensus systems), or they may

try to capture mainstream parties (in majoritarian systems). When it comes to parties as social

movement organizations (SMOs), it is crucial to distinguish between movements from the

(new) left and movements from the (new) right. To be sure, some social movements of both

sides have created their own parties, but the left is more likely to rely on public protest outside
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of the party system than the right, and the mobilization of protest outside of the established

channels is considered much more legitimate on the new left than on the new right in

particular.

The classic movement of the left, the labour movement has, of course, not only created its

own interest organizations (trade unions), but also its own social-democratic and communist

parties. At the same time, the established organizations of the old left have not given up

mobilizing protest outside of the political system. Moreover, the more recent left-libertarian

new social movements which were responsible for the wave of protest that swept across

Western Europe and North America from the late sixties to the eighties of the last century

were highly critical of representative democracy and of parliamentary procedures in

particular. They sought more participatory modes of mobilization, and engaged heavily in

protest activities to push their claims onto the agenda (Kitschelt 1993, Nedelmann 1984).

By contrast, the new populist right, which arguably has been the driving force behind a

second wave of protest that has been following upon the new left’s wave during the nineties

and two-thousands, has mainly mobilized in the channels of electoral politics and (if

available) more institutionalized direct democratic channels, even if it has also been highly

critical of the mainstream parties and of representative democracy. Moreover, it has mainly

relied on populist mobilization strategies. Contrary to the ‘bottom up’ strategy of the new left,

the new right’s populist strategy is a ‘top down’ strategy that establishes a direct link between

the monolithically conceived people and those who govern by a personalistic leader who

‘seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, non-institutionalized

support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers‘ (Weyland 2001: 14). In contrast

to Weyland’s definition that draws on the Latin American experience, several populist parties

in Western Europe (e.g. the Lega or the SVP) are probably better organized at the grassroots

level than most of their competitors. But the element of the personalistic leadership is not
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necessarily incompatible with the existence of more formal organizations. In some cases, the

personalistic mobilization strategy may be the only one available for a political leader, in

other cases (such as the Lega or the SVP) it may coexist with more organized forms of

mobilization. Thus, even if we allow for less than pure cases of populist strategies, we can

still define them in terms of personalistic leadership. Typically, the personalistic leader does

not belong to the established political elites, but is an outsider (a new challenger), who

incarnates the demands of ‚the people‘. This leader has direct, unmediated access to the

people’s grievances, and acts as the spokesperson of the vox populi (Abts 2011: 930).

This key strategic difference between the new left and the new right is linked to the basic

value-orientations characterizing the left and the right, respectively. Rebels on the right tend

to have authoritarian and materialist values, and prefer (orderly) conventional political action

over (disorderly) protest politics, while rebels on the left tend to share libertarian and post-

materialist values, which predispose them for unconventional protest politics. For both the

challengers on the left and on the right, the ‘medium is the message’, i.e. the choice of the

channel in which they express themselves is at the same time an expression of their

underlying message. Thus, Flanagan and Lee (2003, 260ff.), in their comparative analysis of

authoritarian-libertarian value change in the twelve largest and most affluent Western nations,

find differing orientations toward political involvement between authoritarians (who tend to

be closer to the right) and libertarians (who tend to be closer to the left). Authoritarians are

joiners of conventional groups in essentially equal proportions with libertarians. However,

they are not as likely to join political action-oriented groups. Authoritarians have a more

parochial and less cosmopolitan outlook on politics, and, above all, they have a much lower

protest potential than libertarians. Finally, libertarians seem to prefer less continuous, more

task-specific, more individualistic forms of political involvement – such as those provided by

public protesting, while the more traditional forms of political involvement provided by party

politics seem to correspond more to the world views of the authoritarians.

Similarly, Gundelach (1998) explains the individuals’ involvement in four types of protest

activities (signing a petition, attending lawful demonstrations, boycotts, and occupying

buildings), what he calls ‘grass-roots activity’, mainly with value orientations characteristic of

the left. In the twelve West European countries he analyzed, he found that social or political

libertarianism and post-materialism were all associated with grass-roots activity, and post-

materialism turned out to be most important in stimulating such activity. More recently,

Inglehart (2008) has confirmed the positive relation between post-materialist values and

protest activities, and van der Meer et al. (2009: 15) have shown that left-wing citizens are

more likely to turn to protest activities than their counterparts on the right in all twenty

Western democracies that they studied during the early 2000s. Finally, Dalton et al. (2010)

confirm the significant effect of post-materialism and left ideology on protest behavior in their

eighty-seven nations study based on World Value Survey (WVS) (wave 1999-2002).

Moreover, using multi-level models, they show that both the effects of left-right self-

placement and post-materialist attitudes are magnified in democratic and economically

developed countries – that is in the countries which I am focusing on here.

It is, of course, true that, in multiparty systems, the new left has also created its own parties,

above all the Green parties. However, these parties have some characteristics which

correspond to the values of their partisans and which distinguish them from the personalistic

strategies of the parties of the new right: they are parties of ‘individual participation’ which

attribute great importance to their grassroots, and which have continued to mobilize outside of

the party system to a much greater extent than the new populist right (Poguntke 1993). For the

new left, mobilization outside of the party system is part of its standard repertoire, while for

the new populist right, such mobilization is a second best solution when it turns out to be

unsuccessful within the partisan channel of mobilization. This is confirmed by Hutter and

Kriesi’s (2013) analyses, which show that the success of the radical right in electoral terms

leads it to abstain from protest activities, while electoral success incites the radical left to
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engage more intensively in protest politics. More specifically, their analysis of six West

European countries – Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK –

documents the dominance in terms of public protest of both left over right, and of radical

parties over moderate ones. In the protest arena, the left is more present than the right and the

radical left dominates over the moderate left in five out of the six countries; only Great Britain

deviates in this respect because of the protest activities of the National Front in the seventies

and of the BNP later on. The two most successful right-populist challengers – the Austrian

and the Swiss parties from the populist right – have been particularly protest averse.

The transformation of the party system by social movements

Some social movements not only organize as parties, but the parties of these movements

transform the party system. That is, the party system is not only a crucial context condition

shaping the emergence, mobilization and eventual success or failure of social movements,

some powerful movements may, in turn, also be capable of transforming the entire party

system. This has, of course, been the case of the labour movement: all the West European

party systems have been similarly transformed by the rise of its parties, and they have been

differentially shaped by whether or not the parties of this movement subsequently split into a

social-democratic and a communist branch (Bartolini 2000).

More recently, the rise of the Green parties and of the parties of the new populist right has

similarly been driving the transformation of the party systems in Western democracies. The

two types of parties that have emerged out of the last two great waves of protest in these

countries have both contributed to the reinterpretation and reinforcement of the competition

on the cultural dimension of the party space. The Green parties have become the most clear-

cut defenders of a universalistic-multicultural, libertarian position that is opposed by the

particularistic-nationalistic, authoritarian position of the new populist right. As a study of the

impact of cultural (universalistic vs particularistic) and economic (state vs market) preferen-

ces on the electoral choices of European citizens reveals, the cultural preferences are crucial

with respect to the vote for these two types of parties, while the economic preferences are

more discriminating between mainstream parties (Häusermann and Kriesi, forthcoming).

Moreover, the impact of the preferences on the cultural dimension on the vote choice has

generally become greater than the impact of the economic preferences. For the case of France

in particular, this overall finding based on a cross-sectional study is confirmed by a longitu-

dinal analysis (Tiberj 2013). According to the argument I have advanced together with my

colleagues (Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008, 2012), the new populist right, rather than simply

articulating a populist challenge to the mainstream parties which habitually govern, has

instead given voice to a new structural conflict that opposes globalization ‘losers’ to

globalization ‘winners’. At this point, I might add that the Green parties constitute their most

clear-cut opponents on this new structural conflict.

In consensus democracies, the Green and right-wing populist challengers have partly given

rise to new parties, partly they have been co-opted by mainstream parties that have been

transformed in due course. Thus, some social-democratic parties – the French socialists being

an example – have been co-opting the multi-cultural program of the Greens, thereby almost

entirely closing off their electoral niche. On the other hand, some conservative or liberal-con-

servative parties, such as the Swiss people’s party (SVP) and the Austrian Liberal Party

(FPÖ), have transformed themselves under the impact of the new structural conflict to

become the key parties of the new populist right in their respective countries.

As already pointed out, in majoritarian democracies, the rise of new parties coming out of

social movements is much more difficult, which means that the transformation of existing

parties by social movements is more likely. This is illustrated by the US case, where third

parties have a very difficult time and where cooperation with major parties or capture of
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major parties is a promising alternative for social movements. Thus, after having built its own

People’s Party and having experienced the only limited success of this party, the American

populist movement of the late 19th century made a compromise with the Democrats and, in the

presidential elections of 1896, supported William Jennings Bryan, the democratic candidate

who was close to its own cause – with fatal consequences for both the Democratic party and

the populists. Bryan lost the race and went down to the first of three national defeats, and ‘the

People’s Party rapidly shrank from the spearhead of a social movement into an insignificant

sect (before expiring in 1908)’ (Kazan 1995: 45). More recent attempts of presidential

candidates close to social movements met with similar fates – either as third party candidates

(Ralph Nader, Ross Perrot or George Wallace) or as candidates of one of the major parties

(George McGovern for the Democrats in 1972 and Barry Goldwater for the Republicans in

1964).

The most recent transformative force in the US party system has been the Tea Party – a

variant of long-standing forms of conservative populism in America and, arguably, the

equivalent of the new populist right in West European party systems. It is worth having a

closer look at the fate of this movement for an appreciation of the effect social movements

may have in a two party system. As is explained by Skocpol and Williamson (2012), Tea

Party efforts moved forward within and across the edges of the GOP, but not under party

control. The Tea Party had its greatest effect on the party system in the mid-term elections

2010, when it contributed (in addition to the economic crisis conditions) to the victory of

many very conservative Republican candidates, and allowed the Republicans to take control

of the House, and of both the governorships and the legislatures in twelve states (Drew 2013).

The Republican Party had been moving toward the right for some time, and the movement

only quickened after the advent of the Tea Party. The Tea Party activists fulfilled ‘watchdog

functions’, barking at the GOP heels. According to Skocpol and Williamson (2012: 183), the

bottom line for the Tea Party’s impact on Congress – and on state legislatures – lies in its
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capacity to coordinate national pressures from wealthy funders and ideological advocates with

contacts from grassroots Tea Partyers who have a reputation for clout in local districts. When

coordinated pressure can be mounted – as it did in budget battles – the Tea Party delivers a

loud and clear absolutist message to legislators, a message that comes both from advocates in

Washington DC and from local districts. In spite of the fading popularity of the symbolism of

the ‘Tea Party’, the power of hard-right ideologues consolidated during the first years of the

Obama Administration has continued to drive Republican politics, crowding Republicans into

an ultra-right corner and contributing to the paralysis of the American political system (Drew

2013).

The transformation processes I have discussed so far are part of long-term trends that are

enhanced by social movement actors. Party systems may, however, also be transformed as a

result of short-term exogenous shocks. Such shocks may give rise to mobilization processes

which result in a political crisis with profound consequences for the national party system. In

the context of the Great Recession, we have witnessed such transformation processes in

several countries. More specifically, against the background of the crisis, we have seen the

rise of an entirely new phenomenon – the ‘anti-party’, which is a contradiction in terms, but

nevertheless an empirical reality: it is a political organization that mobilizes against the

established party system as a whole by competing with the established parties in the electoral

channel. In other words, this is a protest movement that participates in elections in order to

defeat the established parties with their own weapons. The most successful case in point so far

has been the Italian ‘Five star movement’ (‘M5S’) of the comic Beppe Grillo, but the

‘Grillini’ have by no means been the only movement of this kind. For example, in the 2010

local elections in Iceland, a country that was immediately and very heavily struck by the

Great Recession in late 2008, the voters of the country’s capital Reykjavik turned to the ‘best

party’ of the comic Jon Gunnar Kristinsson, which became the largest party with 35 percent

of the vote. ‘Jon Gnarr‘ had founded the ‚best party‘ at the end of 2009 – as a parody of
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established party politics – asking, among other things, for a ‚transparent’ handling of corrup-

tion. Similarly, the Italian Five-star movement has set out to fight against ‘la casta’, the politi-

cal establishment of the country, its privileges and immoral behaviour: although it also has

some environmental goals in its program, the Five-star movement above all seeks to change

the political process, to introduce more direct forms of participation, to reduce the costs of

politics and to limit the power of individual politicians by forbidding the cumulation of roles,

introducing term limits, and cutting their expenditures and personal allowances (Biorcio and

Natale 2013: 49). In the 2013 Italian national elections, the movement obtained 25.6 percent

of the vote and became the largest party of the country. Given that it subsequently refused to

enter into any coalition and to participate constructively in the legislative process, its success

led to a stalemate in Italian politics (De Sio et al. 2013: 12). The impasse created by the

movement’s policy of non-cooperation could only be overcome by forcing the two major

adversaries in the party system into an oversized coalition government, which, predictably,

has not been able to solve any of Italy’s pressing economic and institutional problems so far.

Although the outcome of the political crisis in which the rise of the new movement has

precipitated Italian politics is still open, it may very well result in a profound transformation

of the Italian party system.

Such a transformation has already taken place in Greece, arguably the country that was har-

dest hit by the Great Recession. For more than three years, Greece saw an enormous,

sustained mobilization against the government’s austerity policies, which were imposed by

the international ‘Troika’ (composed of the EZB, the European Commission and the IMF),

with far-reaching consequences for electoral politics. The party system reconfigured under the

impact of a new political conflict opposing the partisans and foes of the bailout agreement that

imposed this very harsh policy (Dinar and Rori 2013: 274-6). The new political conflict

dimension of the bailout issue, which could be regarded as the Greek version of the

‘integration-demarcation’ cleavage that we have identified in North-West European countries

(Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008), confronted the two pro-European mainstream parties with the

peripheral parties from the left (the Communist KKE and the more left-libertarian Syriza) and

the right (LAOS). The specifically Greek aspect is that this conflict has predominantly been

articulated by the old and new left (KKE and Syriza) and not by the new populist right.

Eventually, Greece experienced a deep political crisis that culminated in the collapse of its

party system during the consecutive parliamentary elections of May and June 2012. In these

elections, the punishment meted out to the two major parties was exemplary: together they

lost no less than 45 per cent of total vote, jointly obtaining no more than 32 per cent. The

socialist PASOK was literally destructed losing more than 30 per cent, but its traditional

conservative opponent, the ND, was not able to benefit from this collapse and also lost 15 per

cent. The May election resulted in a deadlock, which led to the organization of a second

election in June and a limited comeback of ND to become the largest party with 29.7 percent.

The big winner of the elections was Syriza, which saw its vote shares sky-rocket, placing it in

second place, only three percentage points below the leading party (Dinar and Rori 2013:

279). Joining forces the two traditional major parties only barely succeded in excluding the

new forces from the government.

Conclusion

In my discussion of the relationship between political parties and social movements, I have

tried to argue that the borderline between insiders (political parties) and outsiders (social

movements) in politics is not as clear-cut as is often assumed by social movement scholars.

More specifically, I have tried to show that, in addition to the conventional political process

view of this relationship that conceives of political parties mainly in terms of allies of social

movements, social movements may, in turn, also create or reshape individual parties and

transform entire party systems. Let me conclude by stating the obvious: this kind of impact is,
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of course, not given to any kind of movement, but only to important movements capable of

expanding the scope of conflict society-wide. The impact of such movements on the party

system is likely to be particularly profound, when they operate in times of crisis, where they

may serve as the catalyst of a political crisis leading to a realignment of political forces and to

profound institutional reforms.

References

Abts, Koen 2011. Maatschappelijk onbehagen en ethnopopulisme. Burgers, ressentiment,

vreemdelingen, politiek en extreem rechts. Proefschrift, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Bartolini, Stefano 2000. The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860-1980: The

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