ABSTRACT
In a recent piece, McAdam and Tarrow (2010) discuss the question of the relationship between contention and convention in political action. Self-critically, the authors observe that their joint effort (together with Tilly) to overcome the compartmentalization of studies concerning different forms of political action had given little attention to elections. They consider their inattention to the connection between elections and social movements ‘a serious lacuna’ in their Dynamics of Contention (McAdam et al. 2001), “as it is in the entire broad field of contentious politics” (532). To overcome the segmentation of the study of elections and social movements, they propose a series of six mechanisms that they believe “link movement actors to routine political actors in electoral campaigns”. These mechanisms focus on how movements influence the electoral process: movements may turn into parties that participate in elections, or they may form within parties; they may introduce tactical innovations that can be adopted as electoral tools; they may become active in electoral campaigns or react to the outcome of elections. In my own attempt to link the two worlds of social movements and political parties, I have been interested in the opposite causal relationship, i.e. in the question of how political parties influence mobilization by social movements (Kriesi et al. 1995). In our comparative analysis of the mobilization of the new social movements, we were able to show that the configuration of the old and new left — and whether the left was in or out of government — made a key difference to their success.
