When are Parties Ethnic, National, Religious, or Populist?

• In Event: Populism and Nationalism in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Political Science literature on parties has understood them as institutions that aggregate interests, reflecting societal cleavages. The comparative politics cannon has covered the dynamics of party systems from this perspective (Lipset and Rokkan 1967, Sartori 1976), including some influences of electoral systems (Horowitz 1985, Reilly 2001).

Ethnic parties have not been well-incorporated into the general study of party systems. In his consideration of party systems in terms of ideology, Kitschelt (1992) places them on the more particularist / authoritarian side of the spectrum, in contrast to a more cosmopolitan orientation. But not all ethnic or national parties are the same – some might be more cosmopolitan than others. Their potential for difference means that we need to think harder in terms of how to categorize parties with an identity premise. When is an ethnic party a nationalist party? Can a religious party be liberal or cosmopolitan? What is a populist or right-wing party in relation to these categories?

The purpose of this piece is twofold. First, I will establish the conceptual boundaries with which we might better understand some of the differences and similarities between these categories of parties. If populist parties espouse a version of nationalism, can we use some of the extensive literature on ethnic, nationalist, and religious parties to understand populism (Horowitz 1985, Chandra 2004, Birnir 2007)? Or, does the anti-elite aspect (Mudde 2007) or the anti-pluralist streak (Muller 2016) of populist parties mean that we must study them as very different phenomena from ethnic, religious, and nationalist parties? The purpose will be to set up a typology by which we might better categorize these parties in relation to each other. Second, once this party typology is established, I will sketch some of the implications of these different potential party categories on party system dynamics, starting with established work on party systems by Sartori (1976) and Kitschelt (1992). Examples in the piece will be drawn from across Western and Eastern Europe.

Author

• Sherrill Stroschein, University College London