Why a Euromaidan movement party never emerged: a field theory approach
[ 1 ] Instytut Zarządzania i Systemów Informacyjnych, Wydział Inżynierii Zarządzania, Politechnika Poznańska | [ P ] employee
2023
Journal year: 2023 | Journal volume: online first/in press
scientific article
english
- Movement parties
- Political parties
- Social movements
- Euromaidan
- Ukraine
EN Whether or not a social movement will produce a movement party depends on the positions of other actors within a broader political field. This context dependency led to the prevalence of case studies in the movement party literature and a focus on positive cases of such parties actually emerging. We applied the conceptual framework of fields to the study of the 2013–2014 Ukrainian Euromaidan social movement, which did not produce a movement party. Using a variety of data, we showed that the rules of the field favored well-financed political projects able to pay the high costs of entering a political competition. Following the reversal of the EU integration policy, the interests of broad social groups were neglected by the incumbents, while challengers mobilized into a nationwide social movement. Leaderless and decentralized, based on grassroots and crowd-funding, Euromaidan pursued a strategy of developing a horizontal structure. However, the organization-building ambitions of the challengers were put on hold in 2014. Following the Russian aggression, the activists’ efforts had to be reoriented toward protecting territorial integrity and remedying multiple policy failures of the Ukrainian state, which was unprepared for such a scenario.
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