When Do Movements Endorse Political Parties? A Cross-national Survey Experiment

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Organizations and Parties & Elections and Voting Behavior
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Parties and Interest Groups

Abstract

Social movement organizations (SMOs) in the United States frequently endorse political candidates while most European SMOs keep their distance from party politics. What accounts for this difference?

I argue that SMOs aim to retain the broadest possible support among a country's citizenry to maximize donations and their activist base. In order to achieve this goal, the organizations vary their strategies based on two interacting factors: a) the structure of the party system, and b) their issue focus. In a two-party system, an explicit political endorsement reveals little about the organization, especially if the issue is clearly "owned" by one party. In a multi-party system, however, SMO endorsements risk alienating the supporters of all other parties. Thus, SMOs highlight their independence, especially when the risk of being perceived as affiliated with a single party is high.

To determine whether different SMO strategies reflects differences in public attitudes across institutional contexts, I conducted survey experiments in a two-party system (United States), and a multi-party system (Germany). The experiments varied two dimensions: 1) whether the SMO endorsed a party and, 2) the level of issue ownership by including one "owned" (environmental issues) and one "unowned" (digital freedoms) issue. The findings show that SMOs which endorse parties suffer reputational and resource penalties but provide no evidence of contextual effects.

At a time during which many social movements on both sides of the Atlantic - including those on the populist far-right and left- focus on influencing and working through political parties, this paper contributes to understanding their strategies. In doing so, it sheds light on which demands are being heard and the conditions under which channels of representation from civil society to formal political organizations remain open, despite an increasing gap between the two spheres.

Author

• Steffen Blings, Utah State University