Most (new) radical right parties have their origins in the 1980s and early 1990s (Kitschelt & McGann 1995) in strong opposition to the libertarian ideas the New Social Movements and Green parties had introduced a decade earlier (H¨ausermann & Kriesi 2015, Bornschier 2010). Even though their electoral for- tunes have often been volatile, as a party family they have become a constant presence in Western Europe (Art 2011, Mudde 2007) and have been part of coali- tion governments or supported minority governments in several countries in- cluding Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
Movements of the political right have received much less scientific atten- tion than (the new social) movements of the left (Hutter & Kriesi 2013) (see also
49Both parties are outliers with respect to the average parties studied in this project, since they have their roots in the early part for the 20th century. The Swedish People’s Party is the result of counter-mobilization of Swedish-speaking elites and middle classes when Finish nationalism began its ascent in the early 1900s (Raunio 2006, pp. 126-127). Sinn F´ein was founded in 1905 as the party-political arm of the Irish Republican Movement and later the Irish Republican Army (Feeney 2003). Both parties, however, remain surrounded by civil society activity on their core issue (Raunio 2006, Feeney 2003).
Minkenberg (2003)). Accordingly, and similar to regionalist parties, the rela- tionships between radical right parties and nationalist movements are under- researched. Since the rise of the radical right was not accompanied by move- ment activity comparable to the new social movements that gave rise to Green parties, Herbert Kitschelt (2006b) argues that radical right parties do not di- rectly grow out of social movements, but ”create and displace social movement practices” (Kitschelt 2006b, p. 286). Yet, while the mobilization of nationalist movements is not comparable to the environmental movements of the 1970s, the 1990s and 2000s have seen an increase of anti-immigration protest (Hutter & Kriesi 2013) and there are varying levels of movement activities that surround radical right parties across Europe. Art (2011) identifies the “nationalist sub- cultures” of different countries as significant factors determining the success of radical right parties. These subcultures can consist of civil society organizations as well as looser networks of sympathizers and activists. Thus, they provide not only acceptability of radical right ideology in society in general, but also organizations that serve as training grounds for future party elites (Art 2011, p. 113), among other things.50 Moreover, even countries traditionally thought of as
having neither a strong, contemporary nationalist movement nor radical right party have recently seen the rise of both. In Great Britain organizations like the English Defense League mobilize anti-Muslim attitudes (Busher 2015). More- over, after 2009 the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) abandoned its strategy of acting as a pressure group focused on pushing the Conservative Party towards (even) more Eurosceptic positions and began targeting “disad- vantaged voters” by adding “strong nationalist, anti-elite and anti-immigration
50Art (2011) comes to the conclusion that “the foundations for radical right party building were much stronger in France, Austria, and Flanders than they were in the Netherlands, Britain, Sweden, and Wallonia” (Art 2011, p. 125). Italy has also been identified as a country with a “preexisting network of right-wing nationalist organizations” (van der Brug, Fennema, & Tillie 2005, p. 566).
elements” to its appeals (Ford & Goodwin 2014, p. 108). In 2015 UKIP became the largest party in the European elections and won almost 13% of the vote (though due to a majoritarian electoral system only one seat) in the national elec- tions. Similarly, in Germany the PEGIDA movement51 harnesses anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiments (Geiges, Marc, & Walter 2015), and a new party of the radical right, the “Alternative f ¨ur Deutschland ”(Alternative for Germany; AfD) (Berbuir, Lewandowsky, & Siri 2015) has won seats in 13 of Germany’s 16 state parliaments since its inception in 2013. The organizational connections be- tween these movements and the radical right parties are often loose because of the low level of institutionalization of nationalist movements, which prevents formal organizational ties, and the desire of party leaders not be publicly asso- ciated with fascist movements (Rydgren 2002, p. 50) or movement activity that is reminiscent of (neo-)fascism.52
In terms of public mobilization, nationalist movements have, as discussed above, often focused on protest against immigration or related issues, including the presence of Muslims and refugees in West European countries. Radical right parties have consistently shown a focus on the defense of a distinct national culture, described, for instance, as “cultural homogeneity” (Kitschelt & McGann 1995, p. 20) or “nativism” (Mudde 2007, pp. 18-20) and with it the rejection of immigration.53 Table 3.7 illustrates this issue focus by showing that immigration
51PEGIDA is an acronym for “Patriotische Europ¨aer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlan- des” (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West).
52The extremely contentious nature of radical right movement activism, including violent and illegal activity, often makes radical right parties sensitive to being associated with that ac- tivity and thus complicates the scientific study of interactions between these movements and ideologically-close parties.
53Mudde (2007) conceptualizes nativism “as an ideology, which holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (“the nation”) and that nonnative ele- ments (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogenous nation-state [. . . ] The nativist dimension includes a combination of nationalism and xenophobia” (Mudde 2007, p. 22).
occupies the central role for most radical right parties across Europe54 and that
they display clear preferences for extremely restrictive immigration policies.55
Table 3.7: Programmatic Orientation: Radical Right Parties
Salience Position Immigration Immigration Position Immigration Immigration MIP top 3 MIP Immigration
(2010) (2010) (2014) (2014) (2014) Radical Right parties 9.49 (.16) 9.63 (.14) 8 9 9.53 (.13) N 11 11 11 11 11
Data Source: CHES; Salience: 0-10, with 10 being the highest salience; Position 0-10, with 10 being the most anti- immigration positions. Data are means with standard errors in parenthesis. MIP is the number of parties for which the immigration was the top/among the top three issues.
It is noteworthy that beyond immigration, the ideological core of radical right parties, and in particular the role economic positions play in it, is a matter of significant academic debate.56 Kitschelt & McGann (1995) argued that ideal-
typical radical right parties take strong pro-market positions, while Mudde (2007) criticizes this assumption and argues that for radical right parties the economy is a secondary issue57 and that the parties “defend a nativist eco-
nomic program based upon economic nationalism and welfare chauvinism”
54See table D.1 for a list of parties included in the calculation of these statistics. The 2010 data includes the Belgian Front National for which no data was available in 2014, while the 2014 data includes the German NPD, which was not included in the 2010 wave.
55This is not to imply that radical right parties are a single-issue party focused exclusively on immigration (see Mudde (1999) for a strong argument against the single-issue thesis), but that these parties’ focus aligns with the movements’ focus and framing. Radical right parties might well be the expression of a wider antagonism, with the new left representing the other pole of the cleavage (Kriesi 2010), but this discussion is beyond the scope of this project.
56This discussion is connected to a debate about the most appropriate term to describe these parties. For simplicities’ sake I use “radical right parties” here.
57This is in line with Rovny’s finding that radical right parties blur their positions on economic issues while highlighting other issues to increase their support (Rovny 2013).
(Mudde 2007, p. 137). Thus, the one issue focus radical right parties consis- tently maintain across countries and time is identical with the issue nationalist movements have focused and mobilized on. At the same time these parties are at a minimum not formally connected to the nationalist movements on an or- ganizational level, thereby showing most, if not all traits of movement platform parties.
Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated that movement parties before and after World War II were not only ideologically rooted in movement demands, but also built significant organizational connections to movements during their early devel- opment. As table 3.8 illustrates Social Democratic parties in their early phases of development deeply integrated the labor movement on all three dimensions of organizational connections through high levels of formal connections, rou- tinized interactions, and a shared network of elites. As described above, the organizational connections of post-World War II movement parties were some- what weaker, but still significant. These parties shared activists as well as a relevant number of elites at their inception and established informal routinized connections through these actors. Thus movement parties in both time periods integrated social movements in their organizational setup, but the later “gener- ation” of movement parties did so less completely.
Social Democratic parties’ evolution towards electoral-professional parties led to a significant loosening of connections to movements, but as table 3.8 il- lustrates, some links on all dimensions of organizational connections remained.
Social Democrats combine this weakened level of organizational connections with broad catch-all appeals that lack a strong programmatic connection to the labor movement. That is, these parties are ideal-typical electoral-professional parties.
Table 3.8: Models of Movement Parties’ Organizational Connec- tions
Social Democratic Parties Post-WWII Movement Parties Early Contemporary Early Contemporary
Formal Connections high low low absent
Routinized Interactions high medium medium low
Elite Overlap high low medium absent
Parties whose movement roots lie after 1945 have also gone through a pro- cess of development in which they significantly loosened their organizational ties to those movements. In most cases formal connections were completely abolished and the shared network of elites vanished almost entirely. Only a low level of routinized informal interactions remains. Combined with the contin- ued ideological commitment to movement goals these parties thus adopted the movement platform model.
The remainder of this dissertation is dedicated to explaining why contempo- rary parties with movement roots have adopted the movement platform party model instead of following earlier parties’ evolution to electoral-professional models. The next chapter elucidates the reasons for the organizational separa- tion of parties and movements, before chapter 5 turns its attention to the inter- action of the voter base and party and movement elites’ reactions to that voter base in order to explain the retention of close programmatic links between the
CHAPTER 4
ORGANIZING INFLUENTIAL MOVEMENTS: WHY MOVEMENTS AND PARTIES KEEP THEIR DISTANCE AS ORGANIZATIONS
The previous chapter demonstrated that movement platform parties were founded with looser organizational connections to movements than their pre- World War II predecessors and have largely shed the connections that did exist in the first decades of their existence. This chapter explores why parties and movements went their separate ways despite strong incentives for cooperation in pursuit of shared policy goals. Both actors would, for instance, profit sig- nificantly from the coordination of agenda-setting efforts and the pooling of organizational resources for the purpose of mobilization. Why is this kind of cooperation so rare?
The discussion in chapter 2 above provides initial expectations which help to answer this question. In that chapter I argued that social movements have strong incentives to push for organizational separation from the party they spawned for two reasons. First, remaining above the partisan fray allows social movement organizations to retain the support of citizens with different party- political persuasions and to influence parties across the political spectrum. Sec- ond, I argued that the New Social Movement roots of many parties with ori- gins after World War II should lead to organizational separation, because elites from these movements are particularly skeptical about parties’ ability to pri- oritize movement policy goals over the organizational self-interest – including vote/office-seeking behavior – of party elites. Third, the small political parties these movements spawned have few resources to offer that are of interest to SMOs. Party elites are accordingly incentivized to accept the separation and
try to make the best of it by realizing positive radical flank effects. They can achieve these effects by presenting themselves to the electorate as a less radical, more reasonable version of the movements.
This chapter will provide evidence based on interview and survey data sup- porting that all three of these factors incentivize organizational separation. It also identifies organizational imperatives that lead to a separation of elites and create further obstacles for cooperation as an additional reason for the separa- tion. The chapter will address each of these four factors in a distinct section, be- fore briefly discussing how the reasons for organizational separation have fluc- tuated over time and across movement platform parties’ stages of development. A final section concludes the chapter by highlighting how SMOs, contrary to the historical experience of Social Democratic parties and many expectations in the literature, are the central actors in pushing for organizational separation.