The relationship between political parties and social movements has often been understood through a logic of separation: parties compete within formal institutions, while movements mobilize outside them, using different repertoires and forms of organization. Yet this distinction has become increasingly difficult to sustain. In contemporary democracies, contentious and institutional politics frequently overlap, and parties and movements interact, borrow from one another, compete and sometimes become part of the same organizational project.
This panel examines these changing relationships without assuming either the decline of parties or the disappearance of movements. We are interested in how the boundaries between them are negotiated and transformed, and in what these transformations tell us about political organization today. Contributions may engage with different ways of conceptualizing the party–movement relationship, including separate spheres, co-variation, interpenetration and co-evolution.
Particular attention is given to movement-parties and to the broader processes through which parties and movements increasingly share organizational, cultural and action repertoires. This includes both new political organizations that combine electoral competition with contentious politics and established parties that adopt more movement-like structures in order to revitalize themselves. Coalitions including parties and social movements are, in different degrees, relevant in the shaping of contemporary mobilisation and electoral politics.
We particularly encourage comparative or case-based theoretically informed contributions that examine these dynamics across different political contexts and organizational settings. Contributions may explore how party–movement relations vary over time, across political systems and between different types of actors, as well as their implications for representation, participation, political organization and democratic legitimacy.
The aim is to bring party and movement research into closer conversation and to understand what happens between movements and parties as the boundaries between them continue to blur.