Electoral system type determines whether populist leftists build new parties or capture existing ones

Evidence

The outsiders, on one hand, attempted this conquest from outside the established political formations, either by transforming an existing party or by creating a brand-new one. Mélenchon left the French Socialist Party in 2008 and, from then on, tried his luck three times at the presidential election under different labels (Front de Gauche, France insoumise, Union Populaire). Podemos was created almost out of nothing—barring a pre-existing groupuscule, Izquierda Anticapitalista (Anticapitalist Left)—by a group of academics eager to give a political legacy to the social upsurge of 2011. Syriza, a political coalition born in 2004, relatively marginal during the 2000s, took on a completely different dimension in the context of the euro area crisis and found itself in the national government. On the other hand, for Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, creating a third party was hardly conceivable, in a political landscape marked by the longstanding inertia of the main partisan machines fostered by the strongly majoritarian logic of their countries’ electoral systems. Accordingly, they both attempted to seize the wheel of the machine, based on a smart combination of grassroots activism and innovative communication strategies. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 165

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the inside-versus-outside party strategy dichotomy that organizes the whole chapter.
• XREF: connects to: Party-system type determines both attitude to power and citizen-state position

Broader Connections

• Party-system type determines both attitude to power and citizen-state position #expands (0.85)