Party Brands in Europe: on the Movementization of Electoral Politics

Across Europe, political parties increasingly adopt movement-style brands. They choose names that evoke collective action, sponsor protests in the streets, and experiment with participatory organizational forms. This keynote conceptualizes these developments as the movementization of electoral politics: a strategic process through which parties selectively borrow from the symbolic, organizational, and action repertoires of social movements. Movementization reflects broader strains in democratic representation, as declining partisan attachments and diversified forms of participation reshape party–society linkages across European democracies. In the lecture, results will be presented from the first large-scale comparative analysis of this development, drawing on original longitudinal data on party names since 1945, protest event data from 30 countries, expert assessments of party organization, and original survey experiments in four countries. Moving beyond case studies and single party families, the analysis demonstrates that movementization is modular rather than uniform: parties combine labels, protest repertoires, and organizational features selectively depending on institutional context and strategic position. Organizational cues are broadly rewarded by voters, protest strategies are polarizing, and symbolic name changes alone yield limited returns. Taken together, the findings show that movementization is a structured and contextually embedded adaptation to a transformed participatory environment. The keynote concludes by reflecting on how this development reshapes the boundary between institutional and contentious politics in contemporary Europe.

Swen Hutter | Ciampi Visiting Scholar, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung

The videorecording of the event will be available on the SNS YouTube channel. Entrance will be allowed up to the maximum capacity of the room

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