Workpackage four at the University of Copenhagen has reviewed hundreds of images on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to analyze the visual communication strategies of Movement Parties. We ask if differences in country, platform, or a party’s electoral trajectory reflect in the curated visual narrative they present via their social media accounts. Beginning with the Danish party The Alternative, we employ a mixed-method approach that compares image types and policy issues in visual material but also allows for a qualitative discussion of political contexts and visual frames. Want to know more? We will present some insights at this year’s Media and Publics Conference in Roskilde (28th & 29th April). Spoiler alert: Lot’s of Star Wars: https://twitter.com/alternativet_/status/94088274003098828

In April 2022, ProDem member Fred Paxton (University of Milan) and Endre Borbáth (WZB) will co-chair a workshop at the ECPR Joint Sessions. The workshop is entitled: ‘Movement Parties: their rise, variety and consequences’. For more details, see  https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PanelDetails/11354 . (Event scheduled for 19-22 April 2022 at the University of Edinburgh)

As envisioned in the project, the Work Package 5, coordinated by Claudius Wagemann at the Goethe University Frankfurt, starts in the second year of ProDem. It deals with the institutional arena, exploring whether movement parties politically represent the concerns of the mass protests’ participants. Taking a policy analysis perspective, WP5 will investigate the transition of social movements’ political demands into the political system and provide a triple comparison between the agendas of social movements, movement parties, and governments. The next few months the WP5 team in Frankfurt will be analyzing the policy issues which are most important to the selected social movements in the six European countries studied by ProDem and the political agendas of the movement parties connected to these social movements, assessing the degree to which the latter reflect the political demands of the social movements. We will arrive at the political profiles of several most prominent policy issues for each social movement and movement party. In drawing up these profiles we will rely on the results and data from other ProDem Work Packages and complement that with the document analysis of relevant sources in each country case. This step will then bring us closer to the next goal of evaluating the degree to which movement parties and parliamentary and government actors adopt social movements’ policy demands for the set of identified central policy issues, later to be examined through Qualitative Comparative Analysis.