Movement party as a framing strategy: comparing left-wing and right-wing actors in Serbia

Researchers typically define movement parties as political parties that attempt to innovate party-political organizing through social movements’ action repertoire. Apart from being analyzed as a specific type of political party, movement parties can also be analyzed as a type of framing strategy that actors use to enhance electoral mobilization. Although this kind of analysis has previously been undertaken on both left-wing and right-wing movement parties, comparisons that would juxtapose movement party framing strategies of ideologically diverse actors remain scarce. In this paper, we analyze and compare the framing strategy of one left-wing and one right-wing electoral actor in contemporary Serbia. The paper shows that, in the period of their establishment and early activity, the two actors included in the analysis used movement party framing in a similar way. At the same time, however, it also points to inconsistencies within the frames used by the right-wing actor, which relies on the rhetoric of democratic participation while simultaneously promoting elitist and corporatist alternatives to representative democracy.