The Communicative Origins of Programmatic Politics

• In Event: Historical Dynamics in European Parties, Regimes, and States

Abstract

What explains the emergence of programmatic politics? Most of the literature on the origins of programmatic parties is based on research on contemporary democracies. However, the majority of mass-mobilizing programmatic parties that we observe today in many parts of Europe and the Americas had already emerged by the turn of the twentieth century under very different historical circumstances. This paper argues that mass programmatic parties depend on inclusive public spheres to develop and survive. For these inclusive public spheres to grow, two conditions must be met: (1) large segments of the population should be excluded from parochial trust networks, and (2) those same groups must have access to communicative technologies and practices to coordinate collective action. These two conditions were quite rare when mass-mobilizing parties first emerged during the late-nineteenth century, but have been even less frequent in later waves of democratization. Drawing on a new historical dataset on party linkages at the time of popular incorporation, the paper evaluates this argument by analyzing subnational variation in the development of programmatic organizations in France and Sweden prior to World War I, and cross-national analyses of the characteristics of the party and media systems at the time of popular incorporation for a larger sample of cases.

Author

• Agustin Alonso Goenaga Orrego, Lund University