Party Support to Social Movements: An Electoral-Oriented Strategy?

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to explore the logic underlying party support to social movements. Do political parties respond to social movements only when electoral incentives are at stake, as movements’ activists have often lamented and rational-oriented scholarly approaches have maintained? This article tackles this question reconstructing the conditions that led the Dutch Social Democratic party to turn supportive to the social movements’ mobilisations at the time of the ‘participatory revolution’ decades. The analysis will show that not the competitive environment but rather the internal organisational characteristics of the party are the strongest predictor in explaining the party’s openness to the movements. Beyond this specific case, the article provides additional empirical backing to research on party change; shows that rational-oriented perspective can disguise the processes by which events take place and distort their meaning; points to social movements as important stimuli for political parties to change, incorporate new ideas and provide linkage with the citizens.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. AA.VV (1976), La parola elettorale. Viaggio nell’universo politico maschile, Edizioni delle donne, Roma: 9.

2. Paradigmatic in this respect were the protest actions initiated by both ecology groups and the PvdA local sections in 1974 as a response to the decision taken by the (PvdA-participating) government to construct three additional nuclear plants in the Netherlands and to introduce an additional tax (so-called ‘Kalkar tax’) for the financing of the international nuclear reactor project in Kalkar (Germany).

3. See Strom (1990) and Dalton and McAllister (2013) for similar considerations.

4. The importance of intra-party factions in shaping party behaviour was, of course, previously emphasised by Panebianco (1988). Differently from Panebianco, however, Harmel and Janda emphasised the possible pre-eminence of internal factors as drivers of change vis-à-vis external electoral ones.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union Research and Innovation 7FP [grant number FP7-609402 T2M].

Notes on contributors

Daniela R. Piccio

Daniela R. Piccio is Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Turin. She is currently working on a project titled ‘Is more democracy the only cure for democracy? A longitudinal comparative analysis of intra-party democracy in Italy (1948–2013)’ financed by the European Union research and innovation programme (Horizon 2020—Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions). Before she worked at Leiden University for the ERC-funded project ‘Party Law in Modern Europe’. She studied political science at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre and Leiden University, and received a PhD in political science at the European University Institute of Florence with a dissertation focused on the relations between political parties and social movements. Her work has appeared in several international journals and edited volumes, and she has actively collaborated with various national and international NGOs working in the field of comparative political finance.