The survival of the mass party: Evaluating activism and participation among populist radical right parties (PRRPs) in Europe.

人们常说，欧洲政党正在失去其弥合公民与政治精英之间差距的传统功能。20世纪世纪，以地方分支机构组织的大量成员为特征的政党兴起，但现在人们普遍认为“群众政党”的时代已经结束。例如，在一篇著名的文章中，Katz和Mair（1995）认为，政党正在朝着一种新的组织模式趋同：“卡特尔党”。从本质上讲，这种模式意味着政党与国家的关系越来越紧密，而与基层成员或其残余成员的关系则减弱。换句话说，政党成为国家而不是社会的行动者。然而，我们认为，现在谈论群众政党的终结可能还为时过早。特别是在某些挑战传统政治体制（或“卡特尔”）的政党中，这种政党模式表面上仍然很受欢迎。在我们的研究中，我们特别关注民粹主义激进右翼（PRR）政党，这些政党目前对主流政党构成最严重的选举威胁，尽管有几个突出的例外，但也被证明经常采用群众组织并创建忠诚的党派活动家社区（Heinisch和Mazzoleni，2016）。因此，PRR政党不仅对既定政治构成挑战，而且对群众政党时代已经结束的理论构成挑战。在我们的研究中，我们的目的是了解为什么群众党仍然是一个流行的模式在PRR，从党员和党的精英的角度。一方面，我们试图理解为什么不同的人群成为这些政党的积极分子，以及不同类型的政党积极分子对他们的政党有什么贡献。另一方面，我们想了解为什么民粹主义政党的领导层与其竞争对手的“脱离潮流”背道而驰：在他们眼中，采用根深蒂固的政党组织模式的优势是什么。至关重要的是，回答这些问题将使我们能够建立一个更微妙的概念框架，以评估不同的政党发展;而不是围绕类似的组织模式，政党可能会以最适合其目标和意识形态的方式组织他们的政党。我们采取比较案例研究的方法，并调查“生活的党”内四个经验丰富的PRR党，以及建立在他们的政党系统：意大利北方联盟，比利时佛兰芒利益，芬兰党在芬兰，瑞士人民党。为了绘制政党的正式和非正式组织结构，并阐明党员和精英的动机，我们的研究结合了各种方法：它涉及到二手和党的文献研究，在党员中进行的原始调查，与党的活动家的生活史访谈，以及与党代表和高管的半结构化精英访谈。我们的研究首先对学术界有益：我们对政党组织如何运作的认识仍然存在严重的差距，特别是关于党员和积极分子的作用（Gauja and货车Haute，2015）。通过推进我们对PRRP内部发生的事情的了解，我们试图解决这个问题上比较政党研究的严重不足。该项目还将带来学术界以外的好处，因为我们将倾听民粹主义政党的积极分子自己，并在欧盟生活的一个非常关键的时刻详细捕捉民粹主义情绪的个人，文化，社会和组织驱动因素。因此，我们的研究结果不仅对更普遍的政党有影响，而且对对西方民主质量感兴趣的组织也有影响。

It is often claimed that political parties in Europe are losing their traditional function of bridging the gap between citizens and the political elites. Whereas the 20th century saw the rise of political parties characterised by large memberships organised in local branches, it is now widely assumed that the era of the 'mass parties' is over. In a well-known article, for instance, Katz and Mair (1995) argued that political parties are converging towards a new organisational model: the 'cartel party'. In essence, this model entails that parties become increasingly intertwined with the state, whilst ties with their grass-root membership, or what is left of it, weaken. Parties, in other words, become actors of the state rather than society.We argue, however, that it may be too soon to speak of the end of the mass party. Particularly among certain parties challenging the traditional political establishment (or 'cartel'), this party model is ostensibly still popular. In our study we focus in particular on parties of the populist radical right (PRR), which currently pose the most serious electoral threat to mainstream parties and which, despite several prominent exceptions, have also been shown to often adopt mass organisations and create communities of loyal partisans activists (Heinisch and Mazzoleni, 2016). PRR parties, then, do not only pose a challenge to established politics, but also to the theory that the age of mass parties is over. In our research we aim to understand why the mass party is still a popular model among the PRR, from the perspective of both the party members and party elites. On the one hand, we seek to understand why different groups of people become activists of these parties and what different typologies of party activists contribute to their parties. On the other, we want to understand why the leaderships of populist parties go against the 'tide of disengagement' characterising their competitors: what are, in their eyes, the advantages of adopting rooted models of party organisation. Crucially, answering these questions will allow us to build a more nuanced conceptual framework for assessing differential party development; rather than converging around a similar model of organisation, political parties are likely to organise their party in a way that best suits their aims and ideology. We take a comparative case study approach, and investigate the 'life of the party' within four seasoned PRR parties which are well established within their party systems: the Italian Northern League, the Flemish Interest in Belgium, The Finns Party in Finland, and the Swiss People's Party. To map the parties' formal and informal organisational structures, and shed light on party members' and elites' motivations, our study combines a variety of methods: it involves a study of secondary and party literature, an original survey conducted among party members, life-history interviews with party activists, and semi-structured elite interviews with party representatives and executives. We have received confirmation from the parties that they are willing to participate in the research.Our research, first of all, benefits the academic community: there is still a serious gap in our knowledge of how party organisations operate, in particular regarding the role of members and activists (Gauja and Van Haute, 2015). By advancing our knowledge of what happens inside PRRPs, we seek to address the serious shortage of comparative party research on this topic. The project will also have benefits beyond academia, as we will listen to the activists of populist parties themselves, and capture in detail the individual, cultural, social and organisational drivers of populist sentiment at a highly critical juncture in the life of the EU. Our findings thus have implications not only for political parties more generally, but also for organisations interested in the quality of Western democracy.