Pathways of Partisan Ambivalence: Political Outcomes of the Global Wave of Contention (2010-2018)

• In Event: 1104 - Old Problems and New Methods: The Resurgence of Political Parties in Political Sociology

Abstract

Since 2010, the world has seen an expansive wave of global protest, triggered by a combination of economic and political grievances that include austerity measures, unemployment, inequality, demands for public services, authoritarianism, corruption, and state repression. A unifying thread across these protests has been the strong anti-partisan sentiment and rejection of traditional party politics. In this article we explore a widely neglected topic: the political impact and trajectories of partisan ambivalence. We present a new theorization of how interaction between social movement actors and political parties contributes to different forms of frame appropriation by parties (frame lifting, frame and party generation, or frame synchronization), and propose three possible pathways of movement-party interaction over time. We apply this comparative framework in an analysis of how political parties appropriate anti-partisan protest frames in eight cases: the US, UK, France, Greece, Spain, Italy, Argentina and Brazil. We compare characteristics of the local protests as well as the political and economic contexts (economic crisis, corruption scandals, party systems, political polarization, and party fragmentation), and use this comparative framework to cluster the cases. Finally, we examine electoral outcomes across clusters, examining electoral gains of the right and left. We provide in depth case studies of the US, Spanish and Brazilian cases, demonstrating each of our proposed pathways. We close with reflections on the implications of our comparative analysis for understanding the right wing turn around the world.

Authors

• Tomas Gold, University of Notre Dame

• Ann Mische, University of Notre Dame