In recent years, a great deal of disruptive, innovative, bottom-up, political mobilization has embraced the argumentative frame of populism. It involves the claim that its supporters constitute a vast mass of aggrieved citizens—beyond class and other social divisions—who are set against a small but resourceful and well-organized fraudulent economic, political, and technocratic elite that systematically undermines the former’s social welfare. Movement Parties Against Austerity, by Donatella Della Porta and her colleagues, investigates such politics by analyzing the growth and organizational form of new parties drawing on populist movements in Southern Europe (Spain, Greece, and Italy). Written on a larger scale, Paolo Gerbaudo’s The Mask and the Flag generalizes the dynamics of what he calls “anarcho-populism” to a broader global universe with manifestations for countries as far-flung as Brazil, Britain, Egypt, France, Greece, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United States, all of which serve as reference cases where he interviewed activists involved in such movements.

In all instances, at stake is the capacity of average citizens, lacking specific skills and experience in political activism, to mobilize movements to voice grievances they see unaddressed by established political elites. But the struggle moves on to the elites’ turf only when movement entrepreneurs decide to enter the electoral arena with new party formations. Will such “movement parties” advance the cause of their constituencies or ultimately blunt movements by channeling demands into conventional organizational forms and political bargaining? New technology may also play a critical role in that process. Do Internet communication capabilities, particularly mobile devices, change the interest articulation of political movements and the aggregation of demands in parties invigorated by such movements, and thereby ultimately affect the political output and outcome? Or are movements—party synergisms and hybrids—just transitional phenomena that give way to conventional forms of politics, once the realities of resource constraints and institutional policy implementation are acknowledged?

In Movement Parties Against Austerity, Della Porta et al. explore these questions by closely scrutinizing the emergence, organizational forms, and rhetorical appeals of three movement parties, Podemos in Spain, the Five Star movement (M5S) in Italy, and SYRIZA in Greece. They track the circumstances of the emergence and electoral growth of these parties and study the “dilemmas and trade-offs” (p. 25) between movement-inspired forms of political mobilization and exigencies of political decision making, particularly if they make it into government.

This study is based on almost 80 interviews with party activists in the three countries, as well as countless documents. The authors first demonstrate that the new Mediterranean challenger parties all emerged against the backdrop of long-term structural economic weakness. The countries were sufficiently diverse that they all but endowed the Great Recession with unique national economic and political features. These, in turn, gave the movement parties distinctive characters: Whereas SYRIZA in Greece emerged out of Euro-communist currents early in the millennium and embraced a leftist-socialist rhetoric that at least initially attracted a more class-based young electorate, Podemos in Spain was based on an entirely new foundation that emerged after the Great Recession hit. It backpedaled from leftist origins toward a blurrier populist appeal, commensurate with its socially diverse and amorphous young electorate of recession losers. M5S in Italy, finally, rose against the backdrop of decades of structural economic stagnation and the intermittent resistance of a traditional unionist and partisan Left against market reforms. Probably unable to compete against a hard Left with a long historical track record, the new party formation never bothered to crystallize a crisp ideological appeal, but this also made it capable of attracting a broad societal cross-section of dissatisfied citizens, with some skew toward younger voters.

The book details how the different origins and social coalitions configured around each new partisan label are reflected in the organizational modes they deploy to resolve the movement-party tension (Chapter 3), as well as the cognitive-argumentative frames that the parties invoke to rally their electoral movement constituencies (Chapter 4). SYRIZA maintained the most conventional left partisan practices, with limited participatory channels diverging from a conventional formal membership party; it used few Internet technologies and pursued a leftist rallying cry against budget austerity imposed on social-insurance entitlements and public-sector jobs. It also showed comparatively less integration of movements with the party. Whatever signals of bottom-up internal partisan democracy there were then faced marginalization as SYRIZA became the party of government and negotiated with Eurozone governments and the International Monetary Fund about Greece’s macroeconomic and structural adjustment policies.

By contrast, the most recent movement, Podemos, developed a more “liquid” organization with extensive use of Internet technology and social media, albeit also relying on institutional forms of intraparty hierarchical representation, institutionalized leadership bodies, and formal channels of communication. De facto, however, this organizational form conceded great leverage to party leader and general secretary Pablo Iglesias, who constructed a plebiscitarian, charismatic relationship to his followers. This is also reflected in Podemos’s programmatic discourse that has progressively withdrawn from more radical leftist movement demands toward a vaguer “Nordic social democratic approach” (p. 122).

Unlike SYRIZA’s and Podemos’s still considerable efforts at formal party institutionalization, Italy’s M5S, inspired by comedian Beppe Grillo as leader, has sustained a personalistic form of governance supplemented by “very fragmented, incomplete, and sometimes unclear or even contradictory” organizational rules (p. 90) that give the leader sufficiently free reign, which qualifies the party’s organizational form as “charismatic patrimonialism.” (p. 94) Extreme personalism no doubt facilitates the party’s disparate, contradictory programmatic appeals that borrow elements from the left (ecology, basic income, universal health, and education) and from the right (low taxation, especially on real estate, and defense of national industry in which “small businesspeople [are] seen as heroes fighting for the survival of the Italian industrial system” [p. 129]).

In a final substantive chapter, the book sketches the fortunes of lesser left parties in the three Mediterranean countries, the absence of successful new movement parties in countries enduring shocks similar to those in Spain or Italy (Ireland, Portugal) and the varied performance and trajectory of the Latin American Center Left (Brazil, Chile, Uruguay) versus radical movement parties with dispersed (Bolivia) or concentrated (Venezuela, Ecuador) internal authority structures. There is a great number of moving parts in these multiple comparisons so that it is difficult to summarize a single decisive explanation. But the lack of existing left parties’ receptiveness to “liquid” movement-type (or uninstitutionalized) forms of organizational conduct and their consequent inability to assimilate new protest formations invariably plays one important role in accounting for the relative failure of parties to incorporate and represent movement challengers of the political-economic status quo.

The strength of Movement Parties is primarily in the descriptive snapshot of the new Mediterranean party challengers in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Particularly instructive are Chapters 3 and 4 on movement organization and the framing of political appeals. As an explanatory enterprise setting out the origins, development, and current trajectories of the new Mediterranean parties in a broad context of party system development, however, the book offers only tentative and not terribly systematic suggestions. In part, this is because the authors’ assessment is probably correct that it is too early to predict where the current flux may ultimately lead the parties.

Nevertheless, what would have needed stronger contours in the book to account for the appeals and trajectories of the parties, however, is the evolving political economy of the Mediterranean countries. Against a backdrop of weak state capacity and structural economic decline, the populist rhetoric and fluidity, if not contradictory character of the new parties’ demands and practices, may manifest the futility of movements and parties that call for the abolition of austerity and a return to a lost socioeconomic status quo ante or an expansive social protectionist agenda in light of manifest resource scarcity and lack of competitiveness. Maybe it is not too much, but rather too little, neoliberalism (or perhaps neoliberalism of the wrong kind) that has been the problem in Southern Europe. And, maybe for that reason, movement parties appear to exhibit great difficulties in imagining innovative, progressive, economic institutions that reconcile a yearning for social security and equality with the deployment of a globally competitive production system, while also recognizing the scarcity of resources that constrain real-life policy options in the region.

Gerbaudo’s The Mask and the Flag attempts to extend the theme of populist mobilization against neoliberalism and austerity to a broader global scope. He sees a new wave of political activism that was kicked off by the Arab Spring of 2011 (p. 33) spilling over into post–Great Recession movements in Western Europe, as well as in the United States and Brazil. The common denominator of protest is “libertarianism with a populist twist” (p. 17): a “citizenism” appeal beyond class and group politics; ventures to establish and protect civil liberties and democratic participation against the machinations of the elites by occupying public spaces (“movement of the squares”); and the regeneration of leftist, redistributive, political parties with the assistance of Internet technologies, albeit within the realm of national rather than global political spaces. Such mobilization tactics of opposition are in the spirit of radical inclusiveness, setting the vast mass of citizens against a small political-economic elite minority. These “movements of the squares” build on, but also set themselves apart from, earlier antiglobalization movements by making more inclusive rather than countercultural appeals.

Each chapter builds on a stylized contrast of Gerbaudo’s ideal type of the antiglobalization movements around the turn of the millennium with the cohort of “movements of the squares” in the 2010s. Thus, the economic crisis of recent years makes possible an encompassing movement of an aggrieved majority of citizens, rather than the disparate politics of multiple minorities (Chapter 3). The social inclusiveness of the new challenger, then, is combined with a geographical focus on the nation-state as the unit in which to press for policy changes (Chapter 4). More so than antiglobalization, the contemporary movements rely on cyber-communication and social media that Gerbaudo, maybe somewhat surprisingly, hypothesizes will restrain intellectualism and encourage the pragmatism of messaging (p. 147). He does, however, note emerging struggles among Internet vanguard activist websites to control messaging on behalf of the entire movement (pp. 153–54).

The choice of literal or figurative urban squares as sites of deliberation and decision making underlines the movements’ quest for transparency, universalism, inclusiveness, and absence of special-interest agendas. These features reflect the broad scope of the crisis against which the movements are set. The account cannot deny, however, that participatory and inclusive forms of governance—for example, through giant town-hall meetings buttressed by infinite numbers of specialized work groups that report to the assembly (pp. 189–96)—generate a wide range of the pitfalls and frustrations of participatory politics all too familiar from the social-choice and empirical literatures about communal, participatory, grassroots decision making that threaten to incapacitate such undertakings (cf. 196–205).

Most decisively, Gerbaudo sees the movements of the squares departing from their antiglobalization predecessors by embracing the form of party organization as a vehicle to assault existing institutions and “regenerate” democratic interest aggregation. This quest for civic revival goes hand in hand with a reappraisal of the state apparatus as not simply a target to be destroyed but as a means to deploy in order to pursue the collective ends of the citizenry (pp. 213–15). The new movements thereby promote constructive goals of public policymaking—mostly of a center-left hue (progressive taxation, unconditional basic income, as well as universal housing, education, and health care)—and participatory democratic institutional reform (p. 239). Indeed, these are features that the author sees in such parties that enable them to demonstrate the “first inklings of a new Left for the twenty-first century capable of responding to the challenges of a society marked by extreme inequality” (p. 25).

Gerbaudo’s study is better at setting up a loose interpretive frame to sketch common process features of social-protest formations around the globe than it is at developing precise theoretical hypotheses and testing them in a rigorous, systematic fashion. Understood as an interpretive frame, it may be acceptable that the contrasts appear to be overdrawn between how Gerbaudo characterizes the sites of conflict, practices of collective action, and programmatic appeals in social protests subsumed under the “antiglobalization” label, as opposed to the “movement of the squares” label. However, I very much doubt that this distinction will stick upon closer empirical scrutiny. Likewise, I question whether “neoliberalism” is the unifying source and target of protest mobilization that characterizes collective action at the nine geographical sites of conflict discussed in the book.

True, a populist rhetoric that pits the interests of a vast mass of aggrieved citizens against mischievous, self-interested—if not fraudulent—economic, political, and cultural elites inspires challengers all over the world and endows them with a propensity to express distrust of elites and cynicism vis-à-vis institutions. Also true, the yearning for “anarcho-populist,” direct-democratic modes of political governance has been almost ubiquitous in political movements at least since the twentieth century, and often even before then. But the substance of the conflicts about economic and political governance articulated by individual movements appears to be profoundly different across the nine geographical sites discussed in this book.

Neoliberalism can hardly serve as the common target of attack. If anything, social movements in Tunisia, Turkey, and Egypt, and in some ways also in Brazil, appeared to fight oppressive rulers running strictly regulated crony economies and patronage bureaucracies with rent-seeking rackets in charge, all phenomena that are foreign to neoliberal governance. Likewise, in Greece and Italy, and to a lesser extent in Spain, the feebleness of bureaucratic state capacity and the corrosive influence of kinship, corruption, and clientelism on political governance, combined with rigid small-business enterprise networks benefiting from state regulation and incapable of fundamental innovation, can hardly be blamed on neoliberalism, although regional and global neoliberalisms became disruptive exogenous forces undermining these established methods of indigenous economic and political governance. In this sense, they made neoliberalism a rhetorical target for many aggrieved movement activists. This leaves only the British, French, and U.S. cases as genuinely driven by movements against market liberalism, and even here distinctions and qualifications are vital. Rather than straining to feature the uniformity of protest formations around the world with Gerbaudo, it may be more adequate to theorize the contextual distinctiveness of social-protest movements around the globe.