HE Junzhi, GUO Yinan
Movement parties are products of the interlocking between social movements and party politics, and constitutes an important concept for understanding transformations in contemporary Western party politics. Since the 1960s, with the rise of new social movements, movement parties have evolved from peripheral phenomena into significant forces shaping party competition, agenda setting, and democratic governance. Based on a review of existing research, this paper systematically examines the conceptual evolution, theoretical explanations, multidimensional impacts, and future evolutionary trends of movement parties. The findings reveal that from Kitschelt’s concept of the “movement party” to Anria’s notion of the “movement-based party”, scholars have sought to identify key constitutive elements that establish conceptual linkages between political parties and social movements. Movement parties are characterized by loose organizational structures, clear issue orientations, emphasis on grassroots participation, heavy reliance on digital platforms, and leader-driven mobilization. Their rise can be explained from four perspectives: institution, behavior, history, and culture. Movement parties not only impact Western political practice by prompting traditional parties to adjust their policy agendas and mobilization strategies, but also enrich party typologies, promote the integration of party studies and social movement research, and challenge the universal applicability of the “iron law of oligarchy”. In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI has significantly reduced the mobilization costs of movement parties and amplified their inherent mobilizational advantages, while also introducing risks such as information polarization and algorithmic dependence. This paper argues that, in the era of AI, the evolutionary trajectory of movement parties can no longer be understood through a simple dichotomy between “moving toward institutionalization” and “maintaining movement characteristics”. As the boundaries between movement parties and mainstream traditional parties become increasingly blurred, future research on movement parties should move beyond fixed typological frameworks of party classification and instead adopt the “degree of movement orientation” as a key analytical dimension for understanding organizational transformation in contemporary Western political parties.
