Movement parties of the left, right, and center: A discursive-organizational approach

Abstract

The term “movement party” has gained widespread currency in the social sciences in recent years, finding extensive application to political parties ranging from the radical left (Della Porta et al., 2017) to the far right (Caiani & Císař, 2019; Pirro & Castelli Gattinara, 2018). Unlike with other academic buzzwords such as “populism,” however, there is also a notable lack of readily identifiable and competing theoretical paradigms that have made systematic attempts at conceptualizing the term—a problem that Kitschelt (2006, p. 278) already pointed out with his arguably first such attempt, noting that “movement party” lacks well-defined status as “a formal concept with a specific terminological content.” Since then, an influential strand of scholarship building on Kitschelt's work has emerged around what might be termed an interactive-mobilizational approach, for which the primary definitional criterion for being a “movement party” is a hybridity of mobilizational repertoires in the electoral-institutional and protest arenas giving rise to a loosely formalized interactive balance between movement and party orientations (hence the proposed syntagma “interactive-mobilizational”). As will be argued in the following, while this approach has succeeded in spawning a wide range of applications across distinct party types (from anti-austerity to far-right), the definitional focus on protest activity concedes insufficient attention to the organizational dimension and renders the concept of movement parties more or less reducible to what Borbáth and Hutter (2021) have referred to as “protesting parties.” In recognizing both the merits and limitations of this literature, this paper proposes an alternative discursive-organizational approach, drawing on the author's previous work based on the post-foundational discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (2001[1985]) to conceptualize movement parties as a distinct form of political organization: one that is predicated on horizontal integration of autonomously organized movement actors as the basic decision-making agents and constituent subjects within the party. From this perspective, I go on to examine three examples of movement parties of the radical left, center, and far right, respectively: the CUP (Candidatures d'Unitat Popular) in Catalonia, the (now defunct) Együtt in Hungary, and the Right Sector in Ukraine. All three examples vividly illustrate the inherent organizational precarity (and, in some instances, ephemerality) of the movement party form, but also the willingness of these actors to maintain a movement party structure in high-stakes institutional contexts and their ability to exert recognizable political weight within these settings.

The discursive-organizational approach presented here draws on an expanded framework of post-foundational discourse theory in which political organization is understood as a performative extension of discursive constructions of collective identities (hence the syntagma “discursive-organizational”). As I will argue, movement parties are characterized internally by a privileging of a certain type of relation—namely, horizontal coordinative links between autonomously operating movement actors who maintain a dual identity as representatives of the party and of their respective movements—in contrast to what I call Volksparteien of a new type (VNTs) such as Podemos and France Insoumise, which are characterized by vertical plebiscitary links between a centralized unitary leadership and a broad, undifferentiated popular base (e.g., via leadership-initiated referenda open to anyone registered online). As such, movement parties and VNTs can be considered paradigmatic opposites along the horizontal/vertical spectrum; movement parties tend to display a networked or coalitional structure, featuring “assemblies,” “platforms,” and joint executive organs bringing together representatives of distinct movements that remain organizationally separate and autonomous—in the language of social movement theory, as contentious claims-making actors in their own right—while pooling their decision-making input within the party. In this vein, the discursive-organizational approach can contribute to an awareness of the inherently precarious, tension-laden, and often transient nature of the movement party phenomenon—as already recognized by Kitschelt (2006)—while also going beyond the latter's interactive-mobilizational approach to develop an understanding of the organizational specificity of the movement party form.

In the following, the paper proceeds in three main steps: first, an overview of the interactive-mobilizational approach, from Kitschelt's foundational work to more recent contributions; second, a presentation of the discursive-organizational approach, featuring conceptual reflections in conjunction with empirical examples; third, an analysis of the three movement parties of the radical left, center, and far right in turn, followed by a conclusion. The empirical section is mostly of an illustrative character, limiting the analysis to a condensed discussion of each party's organizational trajectory, distinct movement party features as well as notable examples of their uses or modifications over time. These conceptual and empirical considerations provide a basis for a future research agenda, the contours of which are discussed in the concluding section.

Kitschelt's (2006) conceptualization takes on a foundational character for what has subsequently developed into an interactive-mobilizational strand of research on movement parties (e.g., Caiani & Císař, 2019; Della Porta et al., 2017; Pirro & Castelli Gattinara, 2018). Kitschelt's (2006, pp. 278, 280) starting point is “the transition from movement to party” as a locus for hybrid forms of mobilization straddling the protest and institutional arenas—giving rise to movement parties as “coalitions of political activists who emanate from social movements and try to apply the organizational and strategic practices of social movements in the arena of party competition.” He thus takes up an earlier wave of interest in movement–party interactions that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s in relation to newly emerging Green and “left-libertarian” political parties in the wake of anti-nuclear and environmental protest movements (Kitschelt, 1989; Kitschelt & Hellemans, 1990; Mayer & Ely, 1998; Richardson & Rootes, 1994). The overarching interest of this earlier literature is in how movements “become” parties and indeed spawn distinctive logics of party formation, such as that of “constituency representation” vis-à-vis protest movements (Kitschelt, 1989). In his later work on systematizing “movement parties” as a concept, Kitschelt (2006) understands the phenomenon as a specific response within this movement-to-party evolution to questions of collective action and social choice: Movement parties coordinate collective action via a combination of electoral-institutional and protest activity, but with little in the way of formalized organization or internal mechanisms of preference aggregation. Seen this way, the defining characteristics of movement parties consist in their hybrid mobilizational repertoire (i.e., both protest and electoral) as well as their low degree of organizational and programmatic formalization, which in turn allow for productive interaction between movement and party orientations without the latter entirely subsuming the former; movement parties are characterized precisely by this precarious balancing act between logics of protest and electoral mobilization, requiring just the right level of (low) formalization so as to prevent the scales from lurching toward one end or the other.

Following Kitschelt's model, therefore, movement parties are inherently unstable constructs and tend to be short-lived: As the author himself notes, movement parties often evolve into parties without the “movement” qualifier once they develop full-fledged organizational infrastructures and programmatic offers (Kitschelt, 2006, p. 282)—with historical examples such as the Green parties in Western Europe suggesting that the “movement party” phase can be a transient one. It is worth noting here that Kitschelt's definition stipulates a (low) degree, rather than specific type, of organizational structuration: Indeed, he notes that the organizational practices of movement parties can encompass a wide spectrum ranging from patrimonial personalism (“a charismatic leader with a patrimonial staff and personal following”) to participatory democracy (“grassroots democratic, participatory coordination among activists”)—with the unifying feature of all of them being the low investment in organization-building (Kitschelt, 2006, pp. 280−281). It is both theoretically and empirically questionable, however, whether a dual orientation toward movement and party politics goes hand in hand with a low degree of formalized organization: For instance, paradigmatic historical examples of “movement parties” such as the German Greens were predicated on a distinctive set of organizationally codified and formalized rules such as the imperative mandate or the separation of party office and public office, which have also been criticized for their counterproductive effects (e.g., by creating a revolving door between party office and public office due to the limited recruitment pool of activists; Demirović, 1998). Prentoulis and Thomassen (2013, p. 181) have pointed out from the perspective of radical democratic theory that even for protest movements founded on ideals of horizontality or equality, “there is no horizontality without verticality, and no equality without inequality, because horizontality and equality are not natural, but must be instituted”—such as through the creation of representational mechanisms geared toward creating more equal voice (e.g., women's platforms, LGBT platforms, etc.). This point will be revisited in the next section.

In sum, a key thrust of the interactive-mobilizational approach as inaugurated by Kitschelt is the definitional focus on a dual orientation of “collective actors operating both in the protest and the electoral arenas” (Pirro & Castelli Gattinara, 2018, p. 367), which may go hand in hand with a wide range of different organizational forms characterized by a low degree of formalization. The organizational dimension is present in, but not primary for, this approach insofar as it is the degree, not the type, of organizational structuration that defines movement parties: The specific form of organization that follows from a hybrid mobilizational repertoire is indeterminate. Since the mid-2010s—against the backdrop of the post-2010 movements of the squares and their party-political repercussions—a rapid growth of research on movement parties within the interactive-mobilizational paradigm has taken place, including work on identifying distinct party families such as “movement parties against austerity” (Della Porta et al., 2017) or “radical right movement parties” (Caiani & Císař, 2019). On a conceptual level, these contributions have maintained the definitional focus on the dual orientation toward “the party system” and “the social movement field,” which goes hand in hand with a range of organizational tendencies of movement parties—in a similar vein here to Kitschelt—from “decentralized organization” to “trends toward personalization,” with the paradigmatic cases of the anti-austerity subtype being Syriza, Podemos, and the Five Star Movement (Della Porta et al., 2017, pp. 21, 23). Caiani and Císař (2019) deploy an expansive understanding of party–movement interactions based on political and discursive opportunity structures, whereby the interactive–mobilizational hybridity of “movement parties” consists in their adoption of contentious frames from the protest arena within the sphere of electoral politics—a perspective that is then applied to a very wide range of radical right parties in the edited volume, from the Alternative for Germany and the Front National to UKIP and the Independent Greeks to Jobbik and Kukiz’15.

The interactive–mobilizational approach can be said to have succeeded in spawning a growing literature with a dizzying array of applications to empirical cases across countries and regions. The merits of this approach—if applied consistently—can be seen not least in the recognition that a dynamic, nuanced perspective is needed for studying “movement parties” as precarious constructs subject to internal tensions and often constituting transient phenomena within the developmental trajectories of political parties. It remains questionable, however—especially in light of the apparent risk of inflationary usage of the term—why the mobilizational hybridity of protest and electoral repertoires or frames ought to suffice as the core definitional criterion for a “movement party.” Borbáth and Hutter (2021), for instance, have proposed the term “protesting parties” for capturing—as the name eminently suggests—the extent of parties’ engagement in protest activity. It would appear that, for a political party to be a movement party and not just a protesting one, an organizational dimension is needed—something that, however, has been left unsatisfactorily indeterminate in the interactive–mobilizational tradition since Kitschelt. Insofar as movement parties are defined in terms of the degree, rather than type, of organizational structuration, the core distinctive feature of a movement party ultimately becomes reducible to its “protesting” (in addition to electoral) character; quite simply, there is no defining form of movement party organization from this perspective, but rather a wide-ranging spectrum of possibilities. It is this conceptual deficit—while simultaneously maintaining the merits of a differentiated understanding sensitive to the internal tensions and precarities entailed by the movement party form—that the alternative approach in the following section seeks to address.

The post-foundational discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (2001[1985]) advances an understanding of discourse that goes beyond “text and talk” and encompasses all signifying practices, including in their material and performative dimensions (following Foucault's understanding of “discursive formations” as well as Wittgenstein's “language games”; see also Laclau & Mouffe, 2001[1985], pp. 105−110). I have proposed elsewhere an expanded framework of post-foundational discourse analysis (PDA) for the study of political organization as a performative extension of discourse, advancing in this vein a distinction between “movement parties” and “people's parties of a new type” (Volksparteien neuen Typs, VNTs)¹ as prototypically horizontal and vertical forms of organization, respectively: Movement parties are predicated on the horizontal integration of autonomously organized social movement actors collectively represented via internal platforms and collective leadership structures within the party, whereas VNTs are characterized by vertical plebiscitary links between a centralized unitary leadership and a largely undifferentiated mass of “people” as the representative subject interpellated by the party (Kim, 2021, 2022). The basic question underlying this distinction is how political actors construct collective identities and performatively enact them on the level of organizational practices. The key theoretical reference points here are Laclau's and Mouffe's (2001[1985]) understanding of radical democracy as a horizontal politics of autonomy and intersectional solidarity between “democratic struggles” that each define an antagonistic terrain specific to them (e.g., “women's rights” against “patriarchy,” “LGBT rights” against “homophobia,” “anti-racism” against “racism,” etc.) and Laclau's (2005) later theory of populism that foregrounds the vertical dimension of representation, whereby the name of “the people” takes on the function of a catch-all (“empty”) signifier rallying a wide range of demands around a single antagonistic frontier against “the elite.” In this vein, radical democracy and populism can be understood as paradigmatic forms of horizontal and vertical politics, each characterized by a distinct logic of how collective identities are constructed: namely, in terms of horizontal intersectional linkages between autonomously operating movement actors (each autonomously advancing contentious claims of their own) or a vertical (“trans-sectional” as opposed to intersectional following Gerbaudo, 2017) unification of various demands around a popular subjectivity.

On this basis, it becomes possible to consider how these underlying logics of horizontal autonomy and vertical representation map out onto different models of political organization that have proliferated in the past decade in the aftermath of the movements of the squares. Here, I argue that movement parties are a paradigmatic form of horizontal organization that—as the name suggests—interpellates autonomously organized movement actors as internal decision-making agents (e.g., by giving them their own platforms within the party), whereas VNTs are predicated on a vertical logic of constructing a broad, undifferentiated mass of “people” as the representative subject within the party (e.g., via digital participatory instruments that open up membership to anyone registered online) and linked by these plebiscitary channels to a centralized unitary leadership (Kim, 2021, 2022). In other words, the two party types are each characterized by a privileging of a certain type of relation in constructing their collective identities and performatively enacting them on the level of organizational practices: horizontal coordinative ties between organizationally separate movements in the case of movement parties and vertical plebiscitary links between a centralized leadership and a largely undifferentiated popular base in the case of VNTs.

With this discursive-organizational approach, I take the term “movement party” quite literally as referring to a “party of movements”: The party is organized so as to be run by movement actors, who maintain a dual identity as representatives of the party and of their respective movements. The defining features of a movement party organization consist in its horizontally networked or coalitional character, featuring decentralized “assemblies” or “platforms” designed to allow movement actors to operate with relative autonomy (and retain their movement identities) within party structures, in addition to a collective leadership arrangement with the aim of diffusing the vertical concentration of power across multiple representatives of the different horizontally integrated movements. A paradigmatic case of a movement party in this sense is the CUP in Catalonia (to be discussed in the next section); another example from a very different context—and on a much smaller organizational scale—is the Ukrainian left-wing party project “Social Movement,” which was conceived as a “collective instrument” for social movement actors such as radical and independent trade unionists represented in the organizational committee with their own internal platforms such as “the Defense of the Working Class Platform” (Kim, 2020). VNTs, on the other hand, can be understood as the paradigmatic opposite of movement parties along the horizontal/vertical spectrum, relying heavily on the representative function of a “mediatic leadership” (Iglesias, 2015) in appealing to a broad mass of atomized “people” (what Iglesias referred to as “the people of the television”) and inducing them to participate in internal decision-making processes via digital plebiscitary instruments (leadership-initiated referenda in particular) without the financial and temporal costs traditionally associated with party membership. In this vein, the VNT concept is similar to Gerbaudo's (2018) understanding of “digital party,” characterized by a “free membership” model of online participation following a logic of plebiscitary acclamation via digital referenda initiated by and tied to a “hyper-leader.” The prototypical example of such a party is Podemos (especially in its initial phase²): What Iglesias (2015) referred to as the “Podemos hypothesis” was predicated on building the party precisely not around organized movements,³ but exploiting the identifiability of the “pony-tailed professor” from the talk shows to mobilize the broadest mass of voters sitting behind their TV sets to participate with the click of a button in the absence of strong intermediary structures between the membership base and the leadership (see also de Nadal, 2021; Gerbaudo, 2018; Kim, 2020; Rendueles & Sola, 2018).

Within the longer historical arc of party politics, the conceptualization of movement parties proposed here is reminiscent of Duverger's (1959[1951]) “indirect party,” which is structured as a network of constituent organizations such as trade unions and cooperatives (with the main example being the UK Labour Party at its founding in 1900); unlike with Duverger's party type, however, a defining characteristic of movement parties as understood here consists in a horizontal logic of cross-movement coordination extending all the way to the leadership level of the party in the form of a collective leadership structure. The concept of Volkspartei neuen Typs (VNT), in turn, draws on the postwar German notion of Volkspartei (“people's party”), which Kirchheimer (1965) also used as a synonym for his concept of “catch-all party” (Allerweltspartei); according to Kirchheimer, the Volkspartei or catch-all party—in contrast to class-based mass parties with their rank-and-file activist militancy—entails an increasingly de-ideologized and undifferentiated base coupled with a strong party leadership that takes on a heightened integrative function in forging ever more heterogeneous coalitions of voters.⁴ In this sense, the VNT as understood here constitutes something like a modern digital-era reenactment of the classic Volkspartei. While the horizontality/verticality distinction is thus applicable already in the context of historical party types, the paradigmatic contrast between movement parties and VNTs allows for a prototypical present-day understanding of horizontality and verticality as organizing logics permeating the entire relational structures of political parties, from the question of who constitutes the basic constituent subjects of party organization (organized movement actors vs. registered users) to how their links are enacted to what kind of leadership (collective vs. unitary, with assembly-like vs. plebiscitary links).

Within the established literature on movement parties, the distinction proposed here between movement parties and VNTs from a discursive-organizational perspective is strongly reminiscent of what Kitschelt (2006) had identified as a spectrum of possibilities between horizontal coordination between movement activists and vertical patrimonial personalism, or what Della Porta et al. (2017, p. 23) have similarly referred to as a range of tendencies from “decentralized organization” to “trends toward personalization.” In contrast to these approaches, movement parties are understood here in a narrower sense as referring to one half of this spectrum—namely, the privileging of horizontal coordination between movement activists—and, therefore, as corresponding to a distinct organizational form. The key difference, as noted in the previous section, is that an interactive-mobilizational perspective foregrounds the hybridity of mobilizational repertoires as the defining feature of movement parties while leaving the organizational dimension indeterminate. Following a discursive-organizational approach, by contrast, the “movement” character of movement parties is understood precisely in an organizational sense—rather than being reducible to protest activity—such that the party is organized as a horizontal network of movement activists who maintain a dual positioning within the party and their respective movements and, indeed, require formalized mechanisms for doing so, such as movement-specific party-internal platforms and collective leadership structures. From this perspective, parties such as Podemos, France Insoumise, the Five Star Movement, or indeed Syriza (after its founding as a unitary party in 2012/13) are not so much movement parties, but rather the opposite: namely, VNTs characterized by a privileging of a vertical logic of plebiscitary links to a centralized leadership.

It bears emphasizing here that this distinction between movement parties and VNTs—as well as the underlying one between horizontality and verticality—is ultimately a question of degree and relative preponderance. As noted, horizontality and verticality (or autonomy and representation) do not exist in pure form or in a relation of linear trade-off; a horizontal politics of autonomy itself requires representational mechanisms (e.g., a “Defense of the Working Class Platform” allows radical trade unionists to be represented in their autonomy, as it were, with their own platform within party structures). The tension between horizontal and vertical logics is a potentially productive, but ultimately irreducible one: While each of them can allow the other to develop and vice versa, it also places limits on the other (e.g., instituting a “labor platform” within a party entails reducing the complex realities of labor struggles via the representative function of a handful activists speaking in their name). It is also easily conceivable that parties transition from a movement party to something resembling a VNT or even try to synthesize both forms in an attempt to combine the “best of both worlds.” An example of the first occurrence would be Syriza's rebranding in 2012–13 from a coalition of radical left-wing groups to a unitary party shorn of internal platforms and increasingly centered vertically around Alexis Tsipras’ promise to redeem the popular will by becoming prime minister and canceling the Troika memoranda (albeit without the sophisticated digital participation instruments characteristic of more recent parties of this type⁵; see also Prentoulis & Thomassen, 2020; Stavrakakis & Katsambekis, 2014; Tsakatika, 2016)—a move that was also designed to make Syriza eligible for the extra seats bonus for the most-voted party in parliamentary elections. An example of the parallel coexistence of horizontal and vertical logics can be seen in Podemos’ support for autonomous local and regional alliances starting in the 2015 municipal elections, such as Barcelona en Comú with Ada Colau from the local anti-evictions movement as mayoral candidate.⁶

Although the discursive-organizational approach presented here entails a more restrictive understanding of “movement parties” than its usage in the interactive-mobilizational literature, the underlying intention is not least to do justice to what Kitschelt (2006) had already recognized as the inherently unstable, tension-laden, and often transient nature of the movement party phenomenon. By drawing on a theoretical framework grounded in an awareness of the productive but irreducible tension between horizontality and verticality, the approach outlined here can contribute to a nuanced understanding of these dynamics and tensions in addition to a clearer conceptualization of the organizational dimension in demarcating movement parties from other party types (such as VNTs as proposed here). What remains to be tested is the ability of this approach to “travel” across country contexts and party families—whether something like “radical right movement parties,” for instance, would be conceivable from a discursive-organizational perspective. My contention, as will be developed in the empirical analyses that follow, is in the affirmative: concepts such as autonomy and horizontality can be deployed in a formal sense—analytically independently of radical democratic ideals underlying their original theoretical conceptualization, such as “liberty and equality for all” (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001[1985])—to refer to distinct forms of organizational practice that can be found even on the far right in addition to the radical left or indeed the liberal center.

In the following, I discuss three such cases of movement parties of the left, center, and right for illustrative purposes and as a basis for a future research agenda: CUP in Catalonia, Együtt in Hungary, and the Right Sector in Ukraine. The cases have been selected precisely for their prototypical and contrastive character—prototypical in terms of their ideological subtype and contrastive in spanning a wide spectrum in terms of geographic distribution, polity context, ideological orientations, or indeed electoral success and organizational survival—which renders them conducive to mapping out a wide-ranging universe of the movement party phenomenon, from the radical left to the center to the far right, as a basis for further typology-building (see also Gerring, 2007, on the diverse-case logic of case selection). The CUP has remained an important force within the pro-independence bloc in Catalonia with continuous parliamentary representation since 2012 (and at the Spanish level from 2019 to 2023), while Együtt dissolved itself in 2018 and the Right Sector lost its lone parliamentary seat in 2019 and has diminished considerably in domestic and international salience since its heightened prominence during and in the immediate aftermath of the Euromaidan protests. The analyses that follow are of a primarily illustrative character, centering the discussion on a condensed overview of each party's organizational trajectory, distinct movement party features (not least as enacted in these parties’ own self-presentation) as well as notable examples of their uses or modifications over time. Although I refrain from systematically applying the conceptual toolkit of PDA here (e.g., logics of difference and equivalence, antagonistic frontiers) for the sake of simplicity, a key reference point throughout the empirical discussion will be the discourse-theoretically informed understanding of autonomy and horizontality as previously outlined.

The Candidatures d'Unitat Popular (Popular Unity Candidacies; CUP or “CUPs” to reflect the plural) emerged, as the name suggests, as a set of common electoral platforms for radical left-wing pro-independence forces in Catalonia (broadly subscribing to a pan-Catalanist, republican, and socialist vision of independence), initially at the local level. The CUP have organizational roots in a complex, decentralized mosaic of networked local associations, social centers (casales populares), and various radical left groupings (Díaz-Montiel, 2018; Giménez Azagra, 2017), making it difficult to pinpoint a single “founding moment” as an organization. Having contested municipal elections within Catalonia in shifting constellations of local alliances already since 1979, the CUP steadily gained in presence and local representation in the 2007 and 2011 municipal elections before standing in parliamentary elections at the regional level for the first time in 2012, gaining 3.5% of the vote and three seats in the Catalan parliament. The CUP then reached their electoral high-water mark to date in the 2015 Catalan elections with a joint list incorporating various left-republican, anarcho-syndicalist, Trotskyist, and youth groupings, obtaining over 8% of the vote and putting themselves in a kingmaker's position for the pro-independence majority in parliament, which led to a process of high-stakes negotiations that will be discussed below. Even in subsequent Catalan parliamentary elections, the CUP have remained above its 2012 vote share with over 4 and 6%, respectively, underscoring its institutional weight and indeed its indispensability for a pro-independence majority bloc in the Catalan parliament. In the November 2019 general election, the CUP stood in Spanish-level parliamentary elections for the first time and promptly won two seats in the new Cortes Generales.

The CUP's organizational structure strongly resembles the above-discussed prototype of a movement party, consisting of a decentralized network of “local assemblies” (collectively represented at the level of 13 “territorial assemblies” spread across the so-called Catalan Countries) that each operate autonomously with the participation of “activists” (militants); anyone who makes the “commitment” to take part in the decision-making process can become an activist by registering with a local assembly and thus earns the right to participate and vote in the day-to-day decision-making process of the local assembly as well as the “national assembly” of all CUP activists held at least once a year, which in turn elects the “national secretariat” as a collective leadership of the party (Candidatura d'Unitat Popular, 2018, pp. A2–A3). The CUP are characterized by a “municipalist” structure (Candidatura d'Unitat Popular, 2018, p. A4), whereby the local assembly constitutes the unit in which activists are organized and is in turn rooted in locally specific associational and movement constellations (see also Giménez Azagra, 2017)—with the CUP as a whole effectively constituting a coalition of local assemblies whose activists come together in periodic national assemblies to collectively pool their participatory decision-making input. The CUP's activist model of assembly-based participation stands notably in contrast to what Gerbaudo (2018) has identified as the “free membership” model in digital parties or—in my broader understanding—VNTs such as Podemos: The basic decision-making agent and constituent subject within a movement party like CUP is the organized activist in decentralized local assemblies rather than the registered user in leadership-initiated online referenda. Another key dimension to the CUP's movement party structure is the Parliamentary Action Group, in which all the political organizations that supported the expanded CUP list in the Catalan elections are represented and take part in coordinating the joint parliamentary work (Candidatura d'Unitat Popular, 2018) following a logic of horizontal coordination among organizationally distinct and autonomous but allied movement actors.

The high-stakes 2015 post-election negotiations in Catalonia put on display (and to the test) the CUP's movement party model at work. Following an election campaign dominated by the independence question, the big-tent pro-independence alliance “Together for the Yes” (JxS, bringing together the Republican Left and the liberal-conservative center-right) headed by incumbent premier Artur Mas emerged on September 27 as the largest bloc with just below 40% of the vote, requiring the CUP's ten MPs for a parliamentary majority to install a pro-independence government and initiate the secession process. The CUP's national secretariat and parliamentary group adamantly refused to support the establishment candidate Mas as they had promised in the election campaign, voting against him in two unsuccessful investiture votes in parliament in November. After intensive negotiations with (and concessions from) JxS accompanied by internal consultations with activists at the level of the territorial assemblies, the CUP national secretariat put the decision on the Mas investiture to a vote of the national assembly of the party, which rejected backing Mas on November 27 and then—following another round of negotiations and concessions—voted to a tie of 1515 votes for each option on December 27 (elDiario.es, 2015). Following this remarkable outcome, the national secretariat declared its definitive opposition to Mas’ investiture on January 2 in light of the lack of a majority for it in the national assembly (despite the dissent of parliamentary group leader Antonio Baños). This, in turn, resulted in public fallout with JxS and calls for new elections until a last-minute agreement was reached between the CUP and JxS leaderships on Girona mayor Carles Puigdemont as a compromise candidate.

As these 2015 post-election negotiations indicate, the CUP remained steadfast to their movement party model even as they confronted a much larger political formation in a high-stakes game of chicken, with no less than the future government and the Catalan secession process on the line. For a brief moment in late 2015, the future of the Spanish state hinged in no small part on the choices made by rank-and-file CUP activists exercising their decision-making rights at the level of the national assembly of the party. Indeed, with the help of this unique decision-making mechanism, the party arguably achieved its main negotiation objectives with an alternative to Mas as premier and a government that would go on to initiate the secession process with confidence-and-supply backing from the CUP, culminating in the October 2017 unilateral declaration of independence. Following the 2021 elections, the CUP again enabled (via confidence and supply) a pro-independence government headed by the Republican Left. Overall, the CUP as a paradigmatic case of a movement party points to the risks and tensions that such a model may be subject to in volatile institutional settings, but also its ultimate durability as well as the willingness of the party to maintain a movement party structure with an activist model of wide-ranging participation even in a maximum-stakes context such as the post-2015 developments in Catalonia. The CUP experience points not least to the lasting electoral and institutional weight that a movement party with its consistently unconventional organizational practices can exert—and indeed continues to do so.

The Együtt 2014 Választói Mozgalom (Together 2014 Electoral Movement; “Együtt” for short) was launched in October 2012 in a joint declaration of three civic initiatives: the Hungarian Solidarity Movement, Milla (“One Million for Hungarian Press Freedom”), and the Homeland and Progress Association. The declaration called for a joint electoral platform of all “democrats” against the Fidesz government (ruling with a two-thirds majority since 2010) for the 2014 parliamentary elections, with a citizens’ petition launched in support of the declaration gathering over 20,000 signatures (A választói összefogást támogató nyilatkozat, 2012). In the context of a deeply fragmented opposition—from the Socialist Party (MSZP), still reeling from its post-2006 hemorrhaging of support and the breakaway formation of the Democratic Coalition (DK), to the go-it-alone strategies of the Green LMP (Politics Can Be Different) and the overtly far-right Jobbik—the Együtt Movement was conceived as a project of forging a united democratic opposition front via civil society pressure from below. The demonstrative show of unity among the three initiating organizations was performatively enacted as the initiating move in this process, with bridges being built across different sections of society: Homeland and Progress was a platform for young professionals established by ex-premier Gordon Bajnai, a liberal technocrat who had governed with the MSZP; Milla was an (originally Facebook-based) flash mob and protest initiative against the Fidesz government's media reforms, spearheaded by the liberal nonparty civic activist Péter Juhász; and the Hungarian Solidarity Movement was a trade union platform for democracy, labor rights, and the rule of law that notably brought together figures from both sides of the post-socialist/anti-communist trade union divide,⁷ including the former LIGA Trade Unions official from the armed forces Péter Kónya and the Autonomous Trade Unions official (and future chairman) Péter Székely.

“Együtt 2014”—with the epithet “Electoral Movement”—was thus designed as a broad-based platform that all democratic opposition parties would join and use as a springboard for forming a joint list for the 2014 elections; when this failed to materialize, however—with the LMP declaring already a few weeks after the launch that it would not join the alliance—the three initiating organizations took the step of turning the “Együtt 2014 Electoral Alliance” into a political party in March 2013. The party structure corresponded to that of a movement party insofar as it was based on a logic of horizontal coordination between the three constituent civil society associations, with each forming its own “platform” within the new party and being represented at the leadership level. Juhász (Milla), Kónya (Solidarity), and Viktor Szigetvári (Homeland and Progress) formed a collective leadership of the party representing each association, whereby “the founding associations maintain their organizational independence and profile, but actively take part in the realization of the new political force's goals via the three platforms formed by them,” according to a party statement (Együtt 2014, 2013). It is this coalitional or coordinative logic between contentious actors from civil society—who remain autonomous and separate associations in their own right while pooling their decision-making input via organized platforms within the party—that corresponds to a distinct movement party logic, coupled in this case with the performative claim to represent a broad, liberal-democratic center ground of society following a bottom-up logic of movement actors running the party rather than vice versa. Parallel to the party founding, Együtt 2014 concluded a cooperation agreement with Dialogue for Hungary (PM)—a Green splinter party formed by LMP dissenters who advocated joining a broad opposition alliance—with the cooperation between the two organizations being coordinated by a “six-person executive” featuring the co-chairpersons from both sides in addition to Bajnai as joint election campaign head (Együtt 2014, 2013).

For the 2014 parliamentary elections, the Együtt–PM alliance ultimately joined a “Unity” (Összefogás) list headed by the MSZP and bringing together the main opposition parties except LMP and Jobbik, jointly mustering 25% of the vote; three of the 38 seats won by Unity went to Együtt and one to PM. The Együtt–PM alliance then fielded a joint list of its own in the 2014 European Parliament election within Hungary, winning just over 7% of the vote and one seat (behind three other non-Fidesz parties between 9% and 15%). With the visible lack of progress in establishing opposition unity beyond the parliamentary election, however, the Együtt project lost momentum and implicitly gave up its founding aim of rallying a united electoral platform around it. In February 2015, “Együtt—the Party of Era Change” was reorganized as a unitary party without the three constituent platforms and with Szigetvári as lone chairman, prompting Kónya and the Solidarity Movement to quit the party (hvg.hu, 2015). In this manner, Együtt abandoned its movement party model of internal platforms and collective leadership linked to the three founding civil society associations. The restructured party remained a marginal force within the opposition landscape, falling below 1% of the vote and winning just one single-member district seat in the 2018 elections under Juhász's leadership before dissolving itself amid well-known financial troubles in June 2018.

In sum, Együtt constitutes a short-lived and rather unsuccessful example of a movement party, albeit one that—for a brief period after its October 2012 founding—played a visible initiating role in efforts toward a united opposition list and attained a certain institutional weight in the 2014 election cycle (three seats within a small opposition bloc in parliament and 7% for the European Parliament, not far behind the MSZP). The party maintained its movement party structure throughout this period of electoral relevance, projecting the image of a party created and run by civil society actors from below as the driving force of a future opposition alliance against Fidesz. It also succeeded in establishing an electoral cooperation with the PM as an extension of its aspiration toward horizontal cross-party coordination at the leadership level but failed to expand this alliance to other forces. The movement party phase of Együtt came to an end with the party rebranding in early 2015 in a context of continued opposition fragmentation, coinciding with the party's terminal decline and eventual dissolution.

The Right Sector (Правий сектор) is easily the most ambivalent of the three cases discussed here, displaying recognizable elements of a movement party standing in tension with increasingly military command-like leadership practices. The group, founded in November 2013 in the initial phase of the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, gained notoriety in international media (and, not least, Russian state propaganda) with its involvement in violent actions and overt use of far-right symbolism, from its trademark “blood and soil”-based flag to the Wolfsangel (with competing claims about the symbol standing for “Idea of Nation,” without association with National Socialism). In the following, the analysis keys in on the Right Sector's horizontally networked character in conjunction with its role in the Maidan protests—which, coupled with its official foundation as a political party in March 2014, lends it the character of something like an armed movement party of the far right during and in the immediate aftermath of Euromaidan, albeit circumscribed by the salient leadership function of Dmytro Yarosh.

The Right Sector emerged as an “umbrella coalition” of various far-right groupings—encompassing established ultranationalist organizations such as Tryzub, UNA-UNSO, and Patriot of Ukraine as well as far-right football hooligans (hence the reference to “Sector”)—in the context of the initial dispersal of the Euromaidan protest camp in a visible display of police brutality at the end of November 2013, which spawned the formation of various “self-defense” units against police repression (Ishchenko, 2020, pp. 7−8). The Right Sector operated within, but also with considerable independence from, the “official” Maidan Self-Defense led by (former Patriot of Ukraine activist) Andriy Parubiy, “horizontally coordinat[ing] with other Self-Defense sotni” (units) without waiting for orders from above (Ishchenko, 2020, p. 7). Especially after the “Black Thursday laws” passed on January 16, 2014—a turning point that signaled the Viktor Yanukovych regime's willingness for heightened repression—the Right Sector's share of involvement in violent actions increased (while that of the parliamentary far-right party Svoboda decreased),⁸ even taking on a “participatory” character as large groups of ordinary citizen protesters not affiliated with any political grouping lined up to join the fighting for the Right Sector (Ishchenko, 2020, p. 6). In this context, the Right Sector took on the function of an armed movement coalition seeking to radicalize the Maidan protests in the direction of what it called a “national revolution,” performatively enacting its activity as self-defense based on grassroots coordination and as bottom-up initiatives closer to the broad mass of protesters than the institutionalized structures trying to channel them—from the Self-Defense leadership to the three main parliamentary opposition parties (Batkivshchyna, UDAR, and Svoboda) and their mediation efforts vis-à-vis the regime. In this manner, the Right Sector positioned itself not least in demarcation from Svoboda, which sought to distance itself from violent protest and even forbade its activists from taking part in it (e.g., in the context of the January 2014 Hrushovskoho Street riots).

The Right Sector began establishing party-like organizational structures in earnest in February 2014 (prior to the forcing out of Yanukovych), announcing the formation of a “political council” and its willingness to take part in negotiations between opposition forces and Yanukovych (UNIAN, 2014). After Yanukovych's unceremonious departure and in the context of unrest throughout southern and eastern Ukraine (including the Russian invasion of Crimea), the Right Sector was formed as a political party in a closed-door assembly in March 2014, with Dmytro Yarosh (from Tryzub) as party leader and candidate for the upcoming snap presidential elections. It was reported in this context that Tryzub and UNA-UNSO would officially enter the Right Sector's political council and be represented in the new party's leadership, as corroborated by a UNA-UNSO representative (Gulevataya, 2014). While detailed information about the Right Sector's internal organization from this phase is not easy to come by, it is possible to identify here a certain movement party logic of horizontal coordination among organizationally distinct movements collectively represented at the level of the political council, albeit standing in tension with the dominant role of Yarosh and his performative self-staging as a military commander with battle-ready troops at his disposal who deploys them at will for the “national revolutionary” cause and as a means for exerting political pressure on the post-Maidan authorities. Indeed, the initial phase of Right Sector as a party (2014–15) was characterized by recurring threats by Yarosh to deploy armed units against the government if certain demands were not met—including an ultimatum-like threat of a march on Kyiv “with full equipment” barring Interior Ministry reforms and the release of detained fighters, or the threat to disrupt the 2015 LGBT Pride March in Kyiv, which indeed materialized in bloody clashes with police—while insisting on the absolute independence of the party's armed units from other political forces and state structures, such as the newly created National Guard that began absorbing the various volunteer battalions in the Donbas.

The Right Sector's role as a salient far-right movement party actor was relatively short-lived, with its relative weight within the armed far-right scene declining after 2015 in favor of groupings such as the National Corpus (linked to the Azov Battalion) or S14. Yarosh himself resigned and then left the Right Sector toward the end of 2015, after the armed standoff with government forces in Mukachevo and the wounds that he suffered in the Battle of Donetsk Airport had raised questions about his viability as party leader. This departure marked the end of this first phase of the Right Sector, in which it presented itself as an extension of the “national revolutionary” struggle on the Maidan and as exerting a certain political weight from outside the institutions with its combination of armed manpower and media presence—with Yarosh's role as leader with top-down command (and hence blackmail) capability placing limits on the extent to which the party could actually operate as a horizontally coordinated instrument for movement actors of the far right. At the same time, however, Yarosh's influence was itself predicated on the coalitional nature of the Right Sector—and its underlying movement party logic, however limited in practice—as a pooling together of multiple “national revolutionary” groupings and, in this vein, as a continuation of the armed Maidan coalition that had been the founding logic behind the Right Sector. While Yarosh's ability to project his image as representing this same Maidan coalition lent the Right Sector continued visibility, the party never attained much in the way of electoral relevance, with Yarosh receiving less than 1% in the May 2014 presidential election and, although he narrowly won a single-member district seat in the parliamentary elections in October that year, the Right Sector itself obtained less than 2% of the nationwide list vote. In the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections, which resulted in landslide victories for Volodymyr Zelensky and his party Servant of the People, the Right Sector endorsed the Svoboda presidential candidate and parliamentary list together with several other far-right organizations, but these candidacies mustered just 2% in both elections and no parliamentary seats. While the Right Sector is currently known to be fighting with its own units against the Russian invading forces in the ongoing war of aggression on Ukraine, it is tellingly no longer a high-profile target of media attention even for Russian state propaganda (unlike, for example, the Azov Regiment), indicating the extent to which perceptions of its relevance and the corresponding actor constellations have shifted since 2014.

This paper presented an original discursive-organizational approach to the study and conceptualization of “movement parties,” starting from a discussion of the concept as understood in what I refer to as the interactive-mobilizational approach. The aim of the discursive-organizational approach is not least to stay true to a dynamic understanding of movement parties as inherently unstable constructs subject to internal tensions and often constituting transient phenomena—as already recognized by Kitschelt (2006) in his foundational work on the concept—while contributing to a clearer understanding of the organizational dimension that is incorporated, but left largely indeterminate as a range of possible options, within the interactive-mobilizational literature. I propose a definition of a movement party as a form of party organization oriented toward the horizontal integration of autonomously organized movement actors as the basic decision-making agents and constituent subjects within the party, as materialized in horizontally networked or coalitional structures with “assemblies” or “platforms” for different movements as well as a collective leadership of the party as a whole. Movement parties in this sense can be understood as a paradigmatic opposite of VNTs—of which a prototypical case is the early Podemos, often characterized as a “movement party” elsewhere—along the horizontal/vertical spectrum.

While the discursive-organizational approach entails a more restrictive and nuanced understanding of movement parties, the examples discussed here of CUP, Együtt, and the Right Sector illustrate the wide range of political forces and contexts in which movement parties from this perspective can emerge, from the radical left to the center to the far right. All three cases, for all their stark differences, illustrate a movement party logic at work, whereby the central claim to rally various movement organizations or contentious actors from civil society around common aims—whether these be centered on an independent Catalan republic, the restoration of liberal-democratic institutions, or an armed “national revolution”—is performatively enacted via organizational practices of horizontal coordination among movement actors who are represented within the party in their capacity qua movement actors, such as through their own platforms, assemblies as well as joint executive organs bringing together different constituent organizations. While this horizontal logic coexists in a relationship of tension with leadership-centered practices—most vividly so in the distinctive case of the Right Sector as an armed movement party—all three cases discussed here attest not least to the willingness of the actors in question to maintain their movement party structures in high-stakes institutional settings such as the would-be secession process in Catalonia, opposition alliance-building in Hungary, and the “Anti-Terrorist Operation” in Ukraine. All three examples, moreover, point to the far-reaching political influence that movement party organizations with their unconventional structures can exert, whether this is limited to specific protest-related conjunctures (followed by disappearance or decline as in the cases of Együtt and the Right Sector) or in a more lasting vein as is turning out to be the case with the CUP. The CUP experience, in particular, suggests that movement parties can also very much maintain themselves as electorally and institutionally relevant actors across extended periods of time without necessarily disappearing or evolving into run-of-the-mill parties without the “movement” qualifier. Here, ultimately divergent paths between the three cases can also be seen in relation to the question of leadership, with the CUP's continuing retention of its collective leadership practices in accordance with the movement party prototype standing in contrast to the early Right Sector's greater reliance on Yarosh's leadership or Együtt's abandonment of the movement party model of internal platforms and collective leadership.

These considerations suggest a rich potential for a future research agenda drawing and building on the discursive-organizational approach presented here for empirical work across a wide range of contexts. As demonstrated here, a discursive-organizational approach can contribute to differentiated analyses of changes over time in how movement party practices come and go within the organizational trajectories of political parties. The interplay or tension between the internal horizontal dynamics of movement parties on the one hand and institutional or party-system pressures on the other could be seen in all three cases analyzed here and is likewise relevant for the previously noted example of Syriza, whose organizational turn away from a movement party in 2012 in the context of its electoral rise deserves in-depth examination in its own right. Moreover, the conditions of emergence (and possibly also disappearance) of movement parties will constitute a key question for future research from a discursive-organizational perspective, especially in relation to protest conjunctures such as the post-2010 movements of the squares or indeed more long-standing social movements and subcultures such as the Catalan independence movement. In this vein, the analyses presented here could also be extended diachronically to encompass the deeper historical roots and genealogies of movement parties in addition to their subsequent developments over time. This is a task for which the present paper might serve as a conceptual and initial empirical springboard inaugurating a discursive-organizational strand of research within the literature.