Identity politics, old and new: Party-building in the long twentieth century

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to explore the diverse ways that political outsiders construct boundaries of group membership and narratives of social conflict as they carve out a foothold in democratic politics. Across the twentieth century, new party contenders of different stripes have used identity politics to break into electoral competition, finding a place in the democratic sphere by staking a claim to represent some social groups and oppose others, and by linking the groups they oppose to more established parties. Particularly in the early years of building a party, articulating a narrative of group representation can be an effective means of bringing together a well-resourced coalition of actors and gaining a loyal voter base. Yet parties can employ identity politics in different ways, mobilizing groups that have more porous or more consolidated boundaries, and varying the relative emphasis they place on ingroups versus outgroups in their appeals. In this project, I seek to make sense of similarities and differences in outsider identity politics through a macro-historical study of party-building and group articulation in European politics across the long twentieth century. Specifically, I explore the following, intersecting research questions: how are discourses of group representation connected to processes of party-building and formation? What are the different ways of constructing a narrative of group representation, and how do political outsiders choose amongst these options? Why does politics seem to be more group-based sometimes and less so other times? And, finally, is all group politics cleavage politics? To shed light on these questions, I employ a combination of qualitative case studies and quantitative text analysis, drawing comparisons across multiple waves of party entry but focusing on two in particular: the rise of socialist parties in the early 20th century and fascist party-building in the interwar period. To this end I focus on cases of party formation in Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, treating the British Labour Party and the German Nazi Party as crucial ‘key’ cases. By looking to the past, I shed light on processes of political change, both old and new. In the first chapter, I situate the project in the field, exploring how scholars of American and European party systems have theorized the relationship of group identities to processes of political change. I argue that employing a macro-historical approach and taking parties’ appeals to groups –rather than cleavages – as the analytic starting point can better elucidate the dynamics at play. In Chapter 2, I introduce the key concepts of the project, group appeals and ‘styles’ of identity politics. I differentiate within group appeals on two criteria: whether the party references an ingroup, an outgroup, or both, and whether the group that they invoke has firm, social boundaries or looser, symbolic ones. Building on these dimensions of variation, I introduce a further conceptual distinction between ‘styles’ of identity politics: ways that group appeals are invoked as part of larger narratives of group representation. Parties employing solidaristic identity politics purport to represent a firmly-bounded ingroup against clear outgroups as part of a symmetric narrative of conflict, whereas parties employing oppositional identity politics seek to mobilize a heterogenous, symbolically-bounded ingroup on the basis of outgroup appeals. In the first part of my theory, presented in Chapter 3, I explore how group appeals are related to processes of party entry. Building on previous work, I propose a synthesized framework of the three core ‘challenges’ of party-building – coalition construction and maintenance, resource mobilization, and brand differentiation – and identify why constructing a strategy around group representation is particularly well-suited to help new parties meet these tasks. In the second half of the chapter, I provide qualitative support for this theory via a case study of the British Labour Party. In Chapter 4, I turn to methods of quantitative text analysis, finding further support for my hypotheses through a descriptive analysis of hand-coded national Labour manifestos and by applying dictionary methods on a new corpus of Labour election addresses from the interwar period. In the second part of my theory, presented in Chapter 5, I ask why party formation in some periods has been characterized by the politics of group solidarity, and in other periods by the politics of group antagonism. I argue that the style of identity politics that outsiders employ depends on the presence or absence of a politicizable ingroup, and lay out four key criteria that make a social group more or less politicizable, namely: organization, stratification, size, and electoral availability. First, I test the face validity of this theory by applying it to all major waves of party formation in Europe across the 20th century. I then test the theory more systematically in Chapter 6 by looking at the formation of social democratic and fascist parties, comparing the developmental processes and electoral strategies of these parties in Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. I put particular emphasis on the NSDAP case, my analysis of which includes qualitative and quantitative analysis on a corpus of NSDAP member life histories, and discussion of ‘dogs that didn’t bark’ (potential groups that were not mobilized as a new party base) in the Weimar period. Across this wide set of cases, I find evidence in line with the observable implications of my theory. Finally, I conclude in Chapter 7 with some general thoughts and a discussion of my work’s application to and implications for our understanding of the contemporary far right.