Social movements in interaction with political parties

Abstract

Social movements and political parties play vital and often complementary roles for democratic representation (e.g. Kitschelt 1993). At the same time, social movement and party scholars often fail to engage in a fruitful dialogue in order to understand large-scale processes of social and political change. However, new attempts have been made to revitalize this discussion. Among others, McAdam and Tarrow (2010, 2013) have outlined a research agenda on social movements and electoral politics based on the “contentious politics approach.” Moreover, recent research has brought back the cleavage concept to social movement studies (Hutter 2014; Kriesi et al. 2012). Finally, the rise of new hybrid political forces has revived interest in concepts like Kitschelt’s (2006: 280) “movement parties” (defined as coalitions of activists who emanate from social movements and try to apply the organizational and strategic practices of social movements in the electoral arena) or Almeida’s (2010, 2014) “social movement partyism” (defined as opposition parties that align with civil society organizations and use their organizational resources to heavily engage in street protests).