The new partisanship.

AuthorWhite, Jonathan
PositionFACTIONS AND PARTIES

The dramatic expansion of the Labour Party membership over the last year is sharply at odds with conventional political wisdom that the political party is a dying form. It was only recently that one of the most celebrated political scientists of western party politics, citing declining public enthusiasm and an increasingly homogenous political class, declared that 'the age of party democracy has passed'. (1) Recent events in Labour and beyond can hardly disprove the thesis, but they suggest lingering popular interest in the idea of the party. A generalized process of steadily declining membership now seems too coarse a forecast. There are, it seems, a large number of people who, given the right conditions, are still looking for something to sign up to.

But what are they signing up to? The renewal of engagement with the Labour party is a good moment to take stock of where the interest lies, as well as to reflect more generally on what is distinctive to the partisan outlook. The re-emergence of the party as a site of mobilisation invites a broader interpretation of partisanship: not just as a collective that aims to win electoral power but one that does so as part of a principled, long-term project. As well as having important implications for the party's fidelity to its past and for its wider engagement with the general public, this poses distinctive challenges as it opens up to a larger supporter base.

Movements and parties, movements as parties

Labour's leadership election and the party's expansion since have been notable for the visible intersection of two political forms--the party and the social movement. Often their relation has been conceived as one of mutual detachment, even rivalry: while the party pursues long-term goals through the slow processes of political institutions, the social movement rejects this in favour of spontaneous action for more immediate and sharply-defined goals. Yet today one sees efforts to put them in a complementary relation, and indeed to integrate the two. 'Labour is a social movement or it is nothing', Corbyn said at the outset of his campaign. (2) The party seems to have drawn vitality of sorts from the expansion of its activist base with movement-based structures such as Momentum (see the article by Schneider, Klug and Rees in this issue).

This of course is part of a larger pattern: some of the most striking contemporary political mobilisations have involved movements and parties cooperating in tandem, to the degree that the boundary between them becomes blurred. Such has been the story in the Mediterranean with the emergence of Podemos and Syriza, as it was with the Latin American mobilisations on which they consciously modelled themselves. Where larger trends towards declining party membership and electoral participation have been countered, it has tended to be in this hybrid movement-party form. The interest of the Labour case--also that of the Scottish National Party since the 2014 referendum--is how it shows the potential for such dynamics in relation to long-standing parties, not just those that have recently formed.

On the one hand this can be grasped as the effort of party members to remodel their association to take in some of the qualities of movements. Amongst these may be counted a large supporter base, a non-hierarchical mode of organisation (or at least a stated commitment to this) and a tight connection with targeted campaigns at the micro level. In an age of apparently ever more professionalised organisations, and of public disillusion with the same, these qualities have obvious appeal.

On the other hand, the movement/party convergence can be understood as an attempt by movement activists to adopt some of the techniques of the partisan. One of these is the aim to form an enduring organisation. Micah White, one of the founding figures of the Occupy movement, expresses the point well. Referring to the Occupy movement's rapid initial expansion, he notes:

You can't maintain that exponential growth forever; people get burned out ... That sudden peaking has to somehow be locked in, some way of giving it a structure that is able to persist. Looking at where we need to go today in terms of social movements, we need to be able to combine the sudden peaking of a social movement with the ability to create structures that give it a permanence. That's why I talk a lot about the hybridization between social movements and political parties. (3) Another of the features of partisanship such activists may be attracted to is the aim to control political institutions from the inside--as opposed to merely...

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