How Parties Organize from the Grounds: The Genesis of the Movimento 5 Stelle

• In Event: Comparative Politics is Local: Local Politics in the Comparative Perspective

Abstract

We have ample evidence that challenger parties have fundamentally changed European party systems, societies and policy-making. Yet, few studies investigate how challenger parties came into existence in the first place and existing work was unable to directly investigate how parties build up their organizations from the grounds. We focus on the case of the 'Movimento 5 Stelle' and exploit the party's unique organizational structure relying on independent local chapters that operate publicly on online platforms. From the very beginning, M5S organized its meetings via the online tool "meetup" giving us a unique opportunity to study how political parties organize from the grounds. We web-scrapped the entire universe of M5S meetings from the first day of its existence, resulting in a geo-coded dataset with more than 200'000 meetings by more than 1'000 local chapters with an average number of 134 members in 896 different locations in Italy. This rich dataset allows unique descriptive insights into the genesis of a successful challenger party. We then match the events with public opinion and economic data to study which factors contribute to their rise and success. Our findings have important implications for the study of party organizations and how democracies could be re-organized in the 21st century.

Authors

• Thomas Kurer, Harvard University

• Daniel Bischof, University of Zurich