Pantopia Reading Nook 📰🚩

By the late twentieth century, however, political parties in the United States, Europe, and beyond had undergone a profound transformation. Where parties once operated as mass-membership organizations embedded in civil society, they have increasingly become professionalized, elite-driven, and disconnected from the everyday lives of most citizens.

This transformation involved the outsourcing of core party functions — such as voter mobilization, organizing, and issue framing — to networks of advocacy groups and consultants. As a result, what we call “parties” today are often little more than loosely affiliated constellations of interest groups, think tanks, donors, and media operations. As a result, parties have increasingly prioritized short-term electoral tactics, branding, and media messaging over sustained engagement with voters.

Rather than maintaining a durable, year-round presence in voters’ lives, modern parties typically appear shortly before elections — if at all — and deploy highly targeted outreach strategies to small and potentially decisive slices of the electorate. In this model, politics becomes episodic and transactional: voters are contacted when needed, segmented by demographic or behavioral traits, and urged to vote — but, beyond a small activist core, are rarely invited to engage in sustained, year-round party activities. Parties may still coordinate electoral coalitions, but they no longer serve as the primary site where political identities are forged or collective interests developed.

Kuo argues that the transformation of political parties was neither natural nor inevitable. It was the result of strategic choices and institutional shifts — many of them driven by center-left parties themselves. As neoliberalism took hold in the 1980s and 1990s, center-left leaders increasingly embraced market-oriented governance, turning to deregulation, privatization, and austerity as tools of statecraft.

research on Uruguay’s Frente Amplio shows that offering activists a real voice in decision-making helps sustain support and mobilization. In Mexico, the Morena party has taken a more radical approach, randomly selecting candidates from lists of party activists — dramatically increasing representativeness and deepening voter identification with the party. But while these measures may encourage involvement at the margins, they are unlikely to reestablish the kind of social embeddedness that once sustained mass parties.

"While this is just one small example, it reflects a broader strategic orientation: progressives must think less in terms of electoral cycles and more in terms of the long-term rebuilding of hollowed-out institutions."

That means rejecting the model of campaigns as large ad buys and last-minute voter-turnout efforts, and instead investing in long-term organizing strategies that build relationships, trust, and shared purpose in politically neglected communities.

One promising example comes from the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), whose Community Works program operates in low-income rural counties in Virginia and Georgia. These programs — food drives, safety equipment distribution, neighborhood cleanups — are nonpartisan in tone but backed quietly by local Democrats. They aim to reestablish a positive, sustained presence in communities often written off by the party.

. Redirecting even a modest share of that spending to year-round, community-rooted organizing could build meaningful ties in areas long abandoned by Democrats, and without significantly affecting the resources needed to compete effectively in the next election.

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mass-political-parties-democracy-neoliberalism/

Jacobin

Can We Rebuild Mass-Membership Political Parties?

Today advocacy groups and consultants influence political parties more than voters and members. In The Great Retreat, political scientist Didi Kuo shows that this has hollowed out democracy and facilitated the rise of the Right.

61 views09:37