Channeling Antipartisan Contention: Field Structures and Partisan Strategies in a Global Protest Wave, 2008–20161

Abstract

Protest movements that reject political parties are often considered marginal or ineffective due to their hostility toward conventional politics. However, we argue that partisan actors can use protestors’ anti-partisan frames to improve their own competitive positions, often leading to disruptive reconfigurations of party politics. In the post-2008 global protest wave, partisan actors redirected symbolic challenges to their own legitimacy toward field competitors, contributing to the emergence of new factions, parties, coalitions, and populist leadership. We consider why partisan strategies varied across 12 countries, arguing that symbolic deflection was channeled by the institutional structures of local “field architectures.” First, we use proxy measures to map associations between partisan field architectures and political outcomes. Then we use narrative case studies to identify four pathways by which anti-partisan contention was channeled through party-movement interaction. Our analysis shows how symbolic dimensions of field legitimation interact with institutional structures in struggles over field dominance.