Comparative Party-Building in Tumultuous Times

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Recent political turmoil has been re-defining electoral politics across old and new democracies. This political process has been accompanied by the emergence of an unprecedented number of new political parties that have sought to advance populist agendas and articulate the demands and identities of mobilized sectors of society. Yet, despite the prevalence of these new parties and their far-reaching effects on the political landscapes of democracies across the globe, only a small number of these parties have succeeded in securing stable electoral support over time and initiating a process of party institutionalization. How do we explain such instances of relatively successful party building in contexts of profound political crises and social mobilizations? What factors account for the variation in these parties’ levels of electoral success and institutionalization? How have previously existing social networks and organizations shaped the fate of these parties and their paths to consolidation?

This panel addresses such questions through a combination of diverse methodologies and an explicitly cross-regional approach that provide new insights into success and failure of new parties across nascent democracies in Latin America and Sub Saharan Africa and historic democracies in Western Europe. In his study, Poertner draws on extensive interviews with party and organization representatives, along with the analysis of newspaper articles and internal party documents, from Mexico to explore how the institutionalization and structure of new political parties can be shaped by societal organizations. The paper by Giusti-Rodriguez analyzes the social network structures of three party building efforts amongst indigenous populations in Bolivia to examine how the network structures within which political parties originate shape parties’ likelihood of expansion and consolidation. In his study, Weghorst uses original party-member survey data and a nationally-representative candidate preferences survey from Tanzania to understand how internal structures of opposition parties, particularly the activities of parties’ womens’ and youth wings, determine their electoral viability. The paper by Lewandowsky studies the role of party support networks in the case of a populist radical right party in Germany in order to explain the party’s rapid and sustained electoral success.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Building a Party Top-Down and Bottom-Up: The Case of MORENA in Mexico - Mathias Poertner, Texas A&M University

• From Social Network Structures to Political Parties: The Case of Bolivia - Mariana Giusti-Rodriguez, Naval Postgraduate School

• Party-Building Inside-Out: Youth and Women’s Wings in African Opposition Parties - Keith Weghorst, Vanderbilt University

• Building from Scratch? Supply-side Factors in the Success of the AfD - Marcel Lewandowsky, University of Florida

Chair

• Rachel Beatty Riedl Cornell University

Discussants

• Kenneth M. Roberts Cornell University

• David J. Samuels University of Minnesota, Twin Cities