Over the last two decades new political parties became increasingly visible in Europe, on both sides of the political spectrum. Research highlights that these parties increasingly get involved in protest movement and campaigns. However, the role of political parties in social movement studies has been scarcely discussed with literature starting to emerge only now. As such, the objective of Party in Movement is to study the configurations between movements and parties, rather than taking them as separate entities, while mapping these relations in Portugal, Spain and Italy after 2008. Building on Jaspers’ players and arenas interactionist proposal, and Goldstone’s call to explore the role of political parties in social movements, this project aims to explore the interactions between social movements and political parties. Relying on an interactionist approach. I will dispute the classic division between outsiders and insiders, and the rigid boundaries between movements and parties, dominant in social movements studies.5 Not only is this a call to bring a more complex approach to the study of social movements, as it is a call to bring political parties back to sociological analysis. This study will answer how do political parties, movements and other players interact to create new arenas and modify existing ones. More specifically, I ask (1) what roles do political parties assume in social movements arenas after 2008 in southern European countries? (2) how and why do they assume these roles? (3) what is the difference between left and right-wing parties?
My analysis will explore how political parties relate with social movements in Portugal, Spain and Italy. I will focus on the following cases: (1) Portugal – Left Bloc and Chega; (2) Spain – Podemos and Vox; (3) Italy - 5 Star Movement and Lega (Italy). This diversity of cases will allow me to analyse emergent contemporary modalities of political action on both sides of the political spectrum, while exploring in-depth the variations across a seemly similar region.
The research design will focus on relationships between players as arenas rather than actors. First, I will review the literature and contextualise the relation between social movements and political parties worldwide, with emphasis on the cases under study. Second, I will analyse secondary data of protest event analysis (PEA) focusing on parties as protesting players6 since the 2000s, allowing me to trace how, when and why political parties get involved in protests in southern Europe. Third, I will conduct 30 in-depth life story interviews of activists in each country to disentangle the relations between political parties and social movements across time and to identify the main codes present in each country. Lastly, I will conduct a network analysis with the PEA and interviews to identify the relations between movements and parties across time

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