2022/01/17 by Davide Vittori
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Political Influence and Corporate Strategies #Populism, Right-Wing Movements
paper · doi:10.1177/01925121211026648
openalex publication_date 2022/01/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The recent success of new movement parties in Europe brought the attention of party politics scholars to this hybrid party type. There are still many under-analysed theoretical and empirical aspects related to their organization and this article aims to show that despite sharing older movement parties’ traits, these ‘new’ movement parties introduce for the first time a unique combination of plebiscitarian intra-party democracy and party leadership empowerment. The implications of these findings are twofold: first, despite promoting intra-party democracy mainly through new digital tools, the main function of party membership is that of cheerleading; second, the leadership exercises strict control over the organization, thus restricting bottom-up ‘voice’ from the rank-and-file.