Outsider Parties and Group Representation

Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki

Across Europe and beyond, the early twenty-first century has seen the emergence of many new populist actors seeking to mobilize new group identities and narrative frames into party politics. Scholars and pundits alike have watched these developments, worrying about the future of the public sphere and the consequences for democratic institutions. This dissertation project seeks to put recent developments in historical context by exploring how the strategies of contemporary outsider parties echo and differ from earlier phases of new party formation, such as the creation of mass working class and Catholic parties in the early twentieth century and the emergence of New Left contenders in the 1970s and 80s. More specifically, it develops a new schema of different varieties of group-based appeals, and proposes a theory of the conditions under which outsider parties may adopt different types of campaign strategies, drawing on cases from Western Europe. It combines qualitative case studies of processes of party formation with quantitative text analysis of campaign materials. The research has been financially supported by the German Academic Exchange Service, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies. Project duration: October 2021 to September 2022.