Appealing to voters’ group identities can be an effective way for new parties to gain an electoral foothold. Yet political outsiders can do so in different ways, employing competing ‘styles’ of identity politics. Across the twentieth century, some new party families have appealed chiefly to a politics of group solidarity, mobilizing a cohesive ingroup against a clear outgroup within a symmetric logic of group conflict. Other parties have drawn instead on the politics of group antagonism, uniting a heterogenous ingroup of voters through outgroup appeals. In this paper, I introduce a distinction between two varieties of identity politics that new parties can draw upon: solidaristic identity politics and oppositional identity politics. While solidaristic identity politics has been a winning strategy for many waves of new parties, this approach is only possible under certain structural and organizational conditions. I develop a theory to explain divergences in the use of each style and provide support for my hypotheses by comparing two waves of party entry in Western Europe: early 20th-century socialist parties and interwar fascists across Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and was previously a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

Alex’s work focuses on political parties and group identity in Western Europe, in macro-historical perspective. A core theme of her research is understanding how different patterns of political and social organization combine to shape the ‘arena’ of electoral politics and the opportunity space for new competitors. Alex’s ongoing book project studies how challenger parties articulate new group identities into politics, comparing processes of party-building and entry in Great Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands over more than a hundred years. 

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