Between party and social movement. Case study of projects of Andrej Babiš, Karel Janeček and Tomio Okamura in the Czech politics
Abstract
Populism has been a phenomenon with growing significance in the part years in both the European political systems and a political science. There has been a number of businessman who enter electoral politics directly with a new type of party projects.
Projects of businessman cannot be analyzed simply as any other "traditional" political party because there is a strong mobilization aspect present. Therefore, the main goal of this paper was to apply analytic framework of social movement studies.
Dimensions of analysis were membership and recruitment, a mobilization of material resources, a mobilization of ideological and political resources and repertoire of action. The analysis was performed on three cases of the Czech entrepreneurial populism - Andrej Babiš, Tomio Okamura and Karel Janeček.
The analysis shows that despite quite significant differences in membership and recruitment dimension and a material resources mobilization there were found similarities in the dimension of ideological and political resources mobilization. This approach showed being useful in comparing cases that are quite different considering organizational aspect of them, but similar as being representatives of a broader phenomenon - namely political projects of businessmen.