Theorizing a Meso-Level Approach to Political Articulation: The Role of Civil Society Organizations

• In Event: 50416 - Political Organizations

Abstract

While traditional scholarship on party politics has focused on parties’ responses to pre-existing social cleavages, more recent approaches, particularly the "articulation school," highlight parties' ability to reshape social divisions and cleavages. This perspective, however, often overlooks the role of civil society organizations —such as social movement organizations, think tanks, lobbyists, or local civic associations— as agents of political articulation. This paper addresses this gap by showing that while parties have historically been seen as the primary agents of articulation, civil society organizations can often play a vital role, especially in times of party deinstitutionalization. We first theorize two dimensions of articulation processes that are often conflated in the literature, defined as “cultural” and “organizational.” Using these categories, we theorize four distinct mechanisms through which civil society organizations contribute to political articulation processes. We illustrate these mechanisms by drawing on two extensive case studies on different organizations: soccer fans associations in Colombia and advocacy think tanks in Chile. These cases show how these organizations channel and facilitate political representation for both left- and rightwing projects respectively, sometimes even replacing traditional functions of political parties. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of our argument, and pointing towards new avenues for the study of political articulation processes beyond parties and centering on civil society organizations, in the prevailing contexts of weak partisan representation.

Authors

• Tomas Gold, Brown University

• Nicolas Torres-Echeverry, University of Chicago