Political Parties

This paper analyses a little-studied phenomenon: movements within
parties. While parties and movements are often assumed to be
separate entities, the borders between the two have proved to be more
fluent. Parties frequently play a pivotal role in movement politics, and
movements influence parties through the dual militancy of many of
their members. The article presents two cases of Occupy movements
taking place within major left-of-centre parties – the Italian PD and the
Turkish CHP – and analyses the causes of discontent within the party
and the choice of activists to voice this discontent rather than exit the
party. It is argued that, beyond country specificities, shared factors
include the perceived betrayal of social-democratic values, a lack of
internal democracy, and electoral defeats. In both cases, activists’
choice to refer to Occupy in their opposition inside the party can be
explained by the normative resonance of anti-austerity protest claims
and forms within the party, as well as the instrumental exploitation
of mass media attention to Occupy as a logo.

When the United States activists called for people to Occupy#everywhere, it is unlikely they were thinking of the headquarters of the Italian centre-left party. Parties and movements are often considered to be worlds apart. In reality, parties have been relevant players in movement politics, and movements have influenced parties, often through the double militancy of many of their members. OccupyPD testifies to a continuous fluidity at the movement-party border, but also to a blockage in the party's interactions with society that started long before the economic crisis but drastically accelerated with it. In this paper we present the OccupyPD Movement as a case of interaction between party politics and social movement politics, and in particular between the base membership of a centre-left party and the broader anti-austerity movement that diffused from the US to Europe adopting similar forms of actions and claims. Second, by locating it within the context of the economic and democratic crisis that erupted in 2007, we understand its emergence as a reaction towards politics in times of crisis of responsibility, by which we mean a drastic drop in the capacity of the government to respond to citizens' requests. To fulfil this double aim, we bridge social movement studies with research on party change, institutional trust and democratic theory, looking at some political effects of the economic crisis in terms of a specific form of legitimacy crisis, as well as citi-zens' responses to it, with a particular focus on the political meaning of recent anti-austerity protests. In this analysis, we refer to both quantitative and qualitative data from secondary literature and original in-depth interviews carried out with a sample of OccupyPD activists.

This book examines the rise and fall of the Ethio-Eritrean federation which existed from 1952 to 1962. The author argues that the federation was abolished by Eritrean social and political forces rather than by Ethiopia. The UN imposed federation and its constitution was doomed to fail, as these were foreign to Eritrean and Ethiopian conceptions of power.

ISBN: 91-7106-406-0