This article contributes to scholarship on the relationship between political parties and social movements by proposing the concept of ‘party-driven movements’ to understand the formation of a new hybrid model within existing political parties in majoritarian systems. In our two case studies – Momentum’s relationship with the UK Labour Party and the Bernie Sanders-inspired ‘Our Revolution’ with the US Democratic Party – we highlight the conditions under which they emerge and their key characteristics. We analyse how party-driven movements express an ambivalence in terms of strategy (working inside and outside the party), political aims (aiming to transform the party and society) and organisation (in the desire to maintain autonomy while participating within party structures). Our analysis suggests that such party-driven movements provide a potential answer to political parties’ alienation from civil society and may thus be a more enduring feature of Anglo-American majoritarian party systems than the current literature suggests.
Political parties have historically provided a key means by which citizens gain representation in the state, with parties enabling participation, integration, aggregation, conflict management, and linkage. Over recent years, parties' representative credentials have declined and new organisations have emerged as vehicles of representation. What is, however, unclear is the extent to which these new organisations have taken on the representative functions parties are traditionally seen to have performed. In this article, we examine Citizens UK and 38 Degrees as indicative examples to argue that, while opportunities for participation and integration can be found, aspects of aggregation, conflict management and linkage are no longer being performed. Diagnosing this change, we argue that these shifts in representation are having significant but as yet unrecognised consequences for how citizens relate to and engage with contemporary politics.
I propose a theoretical framework for examining the extent to which organisations with social and political goals (OSPs) empower (or disempower) Organisation, as Robert Michels ([1915] 1962) once said, is absolutely necessary to democracy because it provides the voiceless with a voice, it is 'the weapon of the weak in their struggle with the strong' and 'an absolutely essential condition for the political struggle of the masses'. (Michels (1915(Michels ( ] 1962. However, as Michels also observed, the tragic (and perhaps ironic) logic of democratic, emancipatory organisation means that as it grows and becomes more successful, it professionalises and bureaucratises and thus becomes dislocated and distant from those for whom the organisation had been intended (in this case, the working class). Far from being emancipatory and radical, then, political organisation is also 'the source from which the conservative currents flow over the plain of democracy' (Michels (1915(Michels ( ] 1962, thus securing the dominance of an elite concerned with the perpetuation of their own position.Michels' observation that power and organisation are intertwined and in tension with one another has had a lasting resonance in political analysis, particularly the analysis of political parties (see for example: McKenzie
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