Vanguard or Business-as-Usual? Movement Parties and their Institutionalisation

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the transformations that newly created movement parties underwent since their electoral institutionalization. The recent success of these parties in Europe – Five Stars Movement in Italy, Podemos in Spain, SYRIZA in Greece and Unbowed France – brought back the attention of party politics scholars on this hybrid party type. Despite the literature has agreed on a basic definition of a movement party (Kitschelt 2006), there are still several theoretical and empirical aspects that need to be tackled. Firstly, is the movement party a “resilient” organization? In particular, to what extent the electoral institutionalization of a movement party forces an organizational adaptation. And secondly, to what extent movement parties with their porous organization can escape the iron law of oligarchy, i.e. in what ways, if any, they resist the consolidation of the party central office or the party in public office? Starting from an assessment of the four abovementioned movement parties, my findings show that movement parties need to be analysed as a transitory organization, which tend to be severely weakened once the movement party became an institutional actor in the political system. More important, movement parties – following what the literature has found on traditional party organizations – tend to empower the party leadership or the party in central office, when crucial resources has to be distributed within the party.