Populist-left parties replaced mass-party structures with leader-centric media-driven quick mobilization

Evidence

These new electoral challengers looked both backward and forward. On the one hand, they veered away from their most “horizontal” tendencies, as they were explicitly on a quest for institutional power. On the other, they broadly shared the same sociological and linguistic features. Like the movements from which they emerged, their political grammar was articulated around the people, rather than the working class. There was more to it, however. These new political actors hardly looked like the classic form of organizations we were used to seeing on the left. They were actively departing from the mass party model and its dense structures. They had no large memberships and few roots in civil society, nor were there hives of cadres busy on the long, painstaking work of party-building. Instead, these parties were built quickly, revolving primarily around a charismatic leader and the inventive use of new media. In so doing they were adapting to the contemporary environment, where political predators succeed only insofar as they manage to mobilize large numbers of disaffiliated, individuals as quickly as possible. Once again, they were a new kind of political species in a changing ecosystem. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 97

Categorization

• DEFINE: Useful here: the passage defines what distinguishes these new parties from the classic mass-party model.
• SEED: Angle: how the organizational form of protest movements carries (or betrays) their politics — leader-centric populist parties as a contradiction with horizontalist origins.
• XREF: connects to: Parties function as institutional guarantors of political pluralism against populism — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 192; Left populists fused PR skills with square-protest horizontalism into a new politics — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 257; Populist-left parties channeled square-movements’ spirit into electoral bids for state power — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 121 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• European populist-left parties revived mass political enthusiasm around charismatic leaders #corroborates (0.80) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 119
• Brand-building leaders and rage algorithms hollowed out the left’s mass movements from within #complicates (0.80) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1049
• Left populists fused PR skills with square-protest horizontalism into a new politics #corroborates (0.75) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 257
• Populist-left parties channeled square-movements’ spirit into electoral bids for state power #expands (0.75) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 121