Political parties are organizations that represent and aggregate citizens’ interests so that electoral majorities can be built to govern a country. They compete with other political parties through electoral contests to gain votes and access to power. Social movements, by contrast, are “networks of informal interaction between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organizations, engaged in a political and/or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared " " collective identity”.

Decline of political parties

• Observers like Ignazi Piero, Russel Dalton, and Martin Wattenberg have noted a declining role for political parties in long-standing democracies.
• More recent examples from either side of the Atlantic would suggest that the influence of political parties has continued to decline. Pierre Rosanvallon has termed it the emergence of postrepresentative moment.
• Empirically, E. E. Schattschneider’s Global data show countries in many regions of the world have experienced decreases in political party influence in terms of declining membership, voter turnout, and party system stability.

Factors of Decline of political parties

• Rise of niche parties: Nice party is a party which appeals to a narrow section of the electorates, usually highlighting non-economic issues like religion and caste. For examples in Germany the rise of Greens. In India these parties are on a rampant rise like AIMIM. They fail to represent welldefined social interests and cut off the mass participation.
• Crisis of representation- According to Mainwaring, A ‘crisis of representation’ is characterized by unstable patterns of representation and citizens who believe that they are not well represented. Telling examples come from Latin America in the 1990s and early 2000s but also, more recently, from Southern Europe in the early 2010s.
• Identity politics – The rise of identity politics has led to a de-facto presidential form of government in India. Rather than party, charismatic authority of a leader becomes pull fact for people to vote.
• Globalisation - Rampant globalisation has led to more transparency and accountability among the public. This has exposed the grim reality of corruption, dynastic politics and role of money and muscle power in functioning of political parties. The Cambridge analytica issue exposed the same with regard to parties in USA, UK and India.
• Declining political trust and rising dissatisfaction- Thomas Carothers found widespread public dissatisfaction with political parties in the countries that experienced the “third wave” of democratization from the 1970s through the 1990s.

New Social movements as an alternative

• Mobilisation for attaining social justice-Although both the social movement and the political party represent a ‘collective effort’ of people’s participation, but there’s a difference between them. Andre Gunder Frank and Marta Fuentes held that the former does not strive for state power but the latter does. According to them, the objective of social movement is social transformation. The participants get mobilised for attaining social justice. For example Me too movement. These movements raised questions which were basically cultural and humanistic and about quality of life-nuclear disarmament, LGBT, women issues, environmentalism – Middle class associated.
• Movements like Slow Food, with the slogan “Good, Clean, Fair Food,” is a global grassroots movement claiming supporters in 150 countries. The movement links community and environmental issues back to the question of what is on our plates and where it came from. With more than 100,000 members in 1,300 local chapters, Slow Food is a movement that crosses political, age, and regional lines.
• New platform of representation-New Social Movements (NSM) are the reflections of a new ‘representation of society characterised by post-capitalism, post-industrialism and postmaterialism.’
• NSM as an alternative to the political parties could be sought after due to several reasons. Taking the example of Canada, The Western Canada Concept, Western Independence Party, Confederation of Regions Party, and Western Block were all registered political parties representing social movements of western alienation. They all started as NSM and thereafter mobilized people as an alternative to the traditional political parties.
• Failure of political parties in tackling burning issues-Social movements will always be a part of society as long as there are aggrieved populations whose needs and interests are not being satisfied. But, the political parties are distancing themselves from the need of public. Be it the rising unemployment, toppling inflation or the curtailment of freedom of speech and expression, the political parties failed to perform on these aspects.
• Flexible, informal and goal oriented-McCarthy and Zald conceptualize resource mobilization theory as a way to explain a movement’s success in terms of its ability to acquire resources and mobilize individuals to achieve goals and take advantage of political opportunities. NSM movements are more flexible, diverse, shifting, and informal in participation and membership than the political parties, often preferring to adopt non-hierarchical modes of organization and unconventional means of political engagement.

Conclusion

• According to Herbert P. Kitschelt, in democracies, political parties and social movements fulfill similar functions in that they both are key actors in the process of democratic representation. They both contribute to articulating citizens’ demands and preferences, as well as to decisionmaking by aggregating preferences and by providing information. In a well-functioning democracy, they may play complementary roles in the representation of interests.
• Political parties offer political programs and participate in elections in order to gain access to government and to implement them. Social movements seize new demands that remain unanswered by institutional actors and articulate them in the non-electoral channels of the public sphere.
• Together with interest groups, both parties and movements constitute the backbone of citizens’ representation. But the relevance of political parties cannot be denied. Political parties play a crucial role by entering formal institutions of the government.
• New Social Movements may in fact provide basis for new parties to come up based on people’s demands adding to diversity of party system for example the rise of AAP in India from Anti-Corruption movement, Women’s Party in New Zealand etc,
• • In other domains, active social movements can provide resources and backing to important candidates/ political parties that can provide an alternative in formal institutions such as Bancada Activista in Brazil.