Activist Parties and Hybrid Party Behaviours: A Typological Reassessment of Partisan Mobilisation

Abstract

Integrating insights from party politics, social movement and political communication literatures, with a qualitative discussion of hybrid party behaviours observable in different contexts and regions, the article offers an original typology of four models of partisan mobilisation and focuses on a novel possibility, the activist party. Referring to parties that combine a professionalised organisation with the deployment of movement-like tactics to achieve electoral goals, the article points to current resources reducing the organisational trade-offs previously assumed to restrict the combination of electoral appeal with partisan militancy. Through this argument, the article challenges the thesis that under democratic conditions political parties should be expected to abandon outsider strategies for insider ones, while providing an analytical account of emerging patterns of organisational innovation and partisan behaviour being witnessed in contemporary party politics.