Progressive Movement Parties: A Product of the Crisis or Response to the Crisis?

Following the post-2008 crisis period, many new progressive left movements emerged in the countries of Southern and Southeastern Europe (such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, Levica in Slovenia, and the Možemo! platform in Croatia). They were formed as a result of discontent with the political elites of the old left at both local and central level, who were not able to block the neo-liberal reforms of governing parties, or sometimes even advocated these reforms. These groupings mostly began as urban or social movements calling for more redistribution and more representative democracy. Later, however, many of them tried to become parliamentary parties as they grew aware of the difficulty of achieving their goals while operating exclusively outside political institutions. It is important to stress that their entry into the electoral arena often brought stark changes to the previous patterns of party competition. Some scholars see these new progressive movement parties as the nucleus of new democratic ideas, because of their promotion of a new way of doing politics. New movement parties are a kind of hybrid party type. Therefore, the main aim of the paper is to analyse their origins and innovations in terms of organisational structure, as well as to shed light on their innovative policy practices. On the one hand, new movement parties extensively use various bottom-up tools and democratic digital innovations (DDIs) to involve members and try to maintain strategic practices of social movements in the arena of party competition. On the other, they often suffer from an unexpectedly high level of organisational centralisation and personalisation, as well as a tendency for their leadership to employ plebiscite practices.