Emerging Type or Sustained Process? The Movement-Party Hybrid and Neo-Fascism in Postwar Italy

John Veugelers, University of Toronto

Scholarship on movement parties (organizations that combine contentious politics with institutional participation in elections and parliaments) errs by treating them as an emerging type. Combining extra-institutional politics with institutional participation is not new. Instead of a type, moreover, the movement party is better treated in terms of variation. The degree to which a given movement or party combines activities in the street and the ballot box can thus vary across time. To advance these claims empirically, this paper examines the Movimento sociale italiano (MSI), until the 1980s the strongest neo-Fascist party in postwar Western Europe. Evidence from archival and secondary sources indicates that between its founding in 1946 and the surge in left- and right-wing contentious action that started in Italy during the 1960s, the MSI – which contested local and national elections continuously -- traversed three phases: (1) mobilization (significant legal and illegal direct action until 1956; (2) demobilization (sharply reduced or no direct action until 1967; and (3) remobilization (significant resumption of direct action starting in 1968). Extending Haydu (1998), which proposes that time periods for a single case be treated as cases to compare, the analysis treats transitions between time periods as cases to compare. This results in a causal analysis able to address the proposition that the movement-party hybrid is not a type but a contingent outcome. Bringing out the importance of meso-level (i.e., organizational) dynamics within the MSI and the right-wing political space shared with other groups, the findings provide a corrective to previous studies of the movement-party hybrid that instead emphasize extra-organizational factors (i.e., unmet societal demand, scarce partisan alternatives, and low representation thresholds).

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 Presented in Session 215. Abolitionism, Coalition Formation, and Mobilization