Associational Endowments

How do political parties form linkages with everyday people in the absence of the electoral incentives to politicize and mobilize? Using evidence from the Kingdom of Hungary (1867–1918), a developing post-colonial, yet imperial, state marked by extreme political, economic, and social inequality, and drawing on four original datasets compiled during eleven months of archival fieldwork, I show why and how emergent parties organized, politicized, and mobilized disenfranchised populations. I argue that in autocratic contexts rife with social and economic inequality, the origins of mass parties cannot be understood without attending to the non-state provision of social services. In the absence of democracy, incumbent parties focus on legislating and cultivating diverse elite coalitions, giving extra-parliamentary parties the window of opportunity to invest in civil society. Parties invested in associational endowments. These civil society organizations serve as the “civil arms”, some of which deliver essential services to the diverse and poor masses. Yet, unlike existing theories of mobilization generated in contexts with electoral incentives (e.g. Bartolini 2000; Caramani 2004; Thachil 2014), I show that, for the most part, emergent externally mobilized parties do not attempt to cut across dominant cleavages.
Using a series of OLS models, I show that the decentralized non-state provision of social services enabled extra-parliamentary parties to forge durable ties with disenfranchised communities well before mass suffrage. By winning the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised through their stomachs, proto-parties politicized necessity. But in the absence of state resources, extra-parliamentary parties relied on the resources of the church and remittance payments. This compounded political and social identities politicizing forged constituencies along religious and national cleavages (e.g., Cammett and Maclean 2014).
The Hungarian case highlights how political entrepreneurs, operating in contexts with unequal access to the state, used welfare provision as a mechanism of politicization and mobilization. In doing so, they established linkages with potential voters. The article makes three contributions. First, it revisits theories of party origin by showing that electoral incentives alone cannot account for party-building under autocracy and inequality. Second, it illuminates the non-state origins of welfare institutions, demonstrating that service provision was central to the emergence of mass politics (Ansell and Lindvall 2020). Third, it offers lessons for how parties mobilize in contemporary contexts of exclusion, where access to the welfare state remains partial and electoral access is restricted.