Since the Great Recession, new parties challenged the pre-eminence of mainstream parties in many European democracies. In this paper we wonder to what extent this challenge translates in the representative politics. This paper aims to evaluate whether a) in terms of descriptive representation, the new challenger parties renewed the composition of the Parliaments; b) new challenger parties belonging to different ideological families elect different élites. The analysis focuses on two new successful antiestablishment parties: Podemos and Ciudadanos. Podemos belongs to the radical left family while Ciudadanos is a centre-right liberal party. We have built a dataset of the representatives of these two parties and the two other mainstream parties (PP and PSOE) in the Congress (2016), in the Autonomous Communities (2015) and in the Party in Central Office. Our findings suggest that Podemos and C's elites are younger and better educated compared to mainstream parties. Yet, we found that beyond their common anti-establishment background, different core ideologies matter when it comes to other aspects of the descriptive representation: in terms of education and working background, Podemos and C's élites are more similar to their ideologically closer parties, rather than among each other, thus highlighting the irrelevance of the shared anti-establishment rhetoric.
The literature on party change has shown how the advent of the digital revolution and the diffusion of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the democracies of the 21st century have influenced the way political parties communicate and perform their functions. Less investigated, however, is the organizational reaction of political parties to the challenges posed by the transformation of the communications environment. The aim of this paper is to scrutinize whether parties evince a transformative tendency towards virtual models in which new digital ICTs are used as ‘functional equivalents’ of the old organizational infrastructures. To this end, the paper focuses on the Spanish democracy – a paradigmatic case of the political transformations that European democracies have undergone since the 2008 economic crisis – comparing the organizational models of the main political parties: the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the Partido Popular, Podemos and Ciudadanos. Particularly the analysis – through the use of parties' documents – focuses on whether and how digital tools are used by the Spanish parties in three dimensions: the participants in the organization, the organizational configuration and the decision-making process. The main conclusions are: new challenger parties make a more intense and radical use of new ICTs introducing ‘disrupting innovations’ in their organization, while old and mainstream parties gradually adapt their organization to the new digital environment introducing ‘sustaining innovations’; parties on the left make greater use of ICTs in order to foster greater internal democracy when compared to their corresponding parties on the centre-right.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the organizational model of one of the most successful European radical left parties, the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA). Our goal is to analyse SYRIZA’s organizational transition from the electoral arena to the government (2015). Our main finding is that SYRIZA started as a socially-oriented organization led by an oligarchic dominant coalition and converted itself into a political party, characterized by a prevailing role of the party in public office/party government. Both the institutional environment and the party organization’s first configuration have had an impact on this change.
Since the beginning of the Great Recession, the issue of European integration has become increasingly salient in many European polities. The European left has adopted a different stance toward European integration, both in terms of economic and welfare-state integration. On the one hand, radical left parties (RLPs) have always opposed a process of integration dominated by neoliberal logic; on the other hand, the social democratic parties (SDPs) have appeared as one of the main pro-EU party families, identifying the EU as a privileged space in which to promote the building of a European social model. In this paper, we propose a binary comparison between RLPs and SDPs in Italy and Spain with a qualitative content analysis methodology. Our results show that albeit the crisis brought SDPs closer to a Eurocritical stance vis-a-vis the social-Europe, this dimension along with the political integration are still dividing issues for the RLPs and SDPs families.
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