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Chapter 2 expands the analysis of the acceptance of parties by signalling the distinction between theoretical speculation and party politics ‘on the ground’. After the ideological and practical acceptance of parties in late eighteenth-century Britain, parties found their first operation on the ground in revolutionary France and the United States. Particular attention is devoted to the events of the French revolution where the Jacobin clubs set up, albeit for a very short period, the first ever nationwide, organized political party. In the nineteenth century the appearance of political parties was still regarded with suspicion and caution, and they were not yet fully endorsed even by liberal thinkers. The idea of partition and division was still held back by the advocacy of unity and uniformity. By the end of the nineteenth century parties had been ideologically tamed by the rise of the holist dominant value of the nation (France) and state (Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy).

Most accounts of the emergence of new parties are episodic, but to understand the rise and breakthrough of new parties in Central Europe requires an understanding of the links between party death and party birth, between one cohort of new parties and the next. Parties proclaiming their novelty, anti-corruption appeals, and the celebrity of their leader usually do not survive for long. Their death creates space for a newer party to emerge and break through. This chapter illustrates the dynamic in terms of a new party subsystem. Tracing the movement of voters from one election to the next offers clear evidence that once voters have chosen a new party in one election, they are more likely to choose a newer party in the subsequent election. Computer simulations help to illustrate the dynamics of new party emergence and gauge the impact of specific factors in explaining new party emergence.

Chapter 10, “15-M and Podemos: Explaining the Puzzle of the ‘Electoral Turn,’ ” explores the relationship between 15-M and Podemos to answer a central puzzle that arises from the case of 15-M: How did so many members of a movement that was radically committed to critiquing representative democracy embrace the Podemos electoral initiative less than three years later while still claiming allegiance to the spirit and identity of the 15-M movement? It argues that party strategists engaged in extensive discursive work to overcome their cognitive dissonance and realign their activist identities to embrace an electoral option without reneging their 15-M identity. Podemos managed to convince 15-M activists by offering the promise of integrating core elements of 15-M political culture into the party, including autonomy, feminism, and a digitally enabled hacker ethic.

Chapter 11, “Podemos: A Hybrid Party?” traces the evolution of Podemos from its inception through its two constituent assemblies to address the question of whether movement and party logics can ever be reconciled. This chapter provides an analysis of the tensions and contradictions of hybrid parties. Hybrid or movement parties—initially at least—need to satisfy and maintain legitimacy with their movement base, which in the case of Podemos is 15-M. Since its inception, Podemos has struggled to satisfy the expectations of its activist base and to strike a balance between (horizontal) movement and (vertical) party, a challenge all the more difficult given the 15-M movement’s commitment to participatory democracy. The chapter explores the central tension between movement and party by analyzing internal and 15-M movement critiques of the party and the challenges it faces in trying to maintain the support of its activist grassroots base.

Area-specific knowledge is indispensable for studying political development, but this can also lead to “blindspots” when conducting historical research if one’s horizons are limited to conventionally defined “areas.” Focusing on the 19th century, the author argues that the compartmentalization of the study of European and American political development has restricted our understanding of both. Particularly in struggles over democratization, pre-democratic elites in both regions saw their fates as linked and adopted similar strategies. In fact, one such strategy—the manipulation of electoral systems to limit working-class influence—was a mainstay of European politics, but first emerged in the American context. This finding illustrates the benefits of a comparative area studies (CAS) framework. A context-sensitive comparison of European and American political development offers a new perspective on the question of institutional endogeneity in Europe, while offering a new take on the question of “why no workers’ parties in the United States?”