Südosteuropa 66 (2018), no. 4, pp. 554-576 ALBERTO SARTORI and JOACHIM PRANZL Politics Going Civil. Contentious (Party) Politics in Montenegro Abstract. In 2015, Montenegro’s oppositional alliance Democratic Front (DF) launched ‘Freedom Calling’, a contentious campaign demanding regime change. Although presented as non-partisan, it did feature a party-stemming background. Thus, politics turned civil— meaning that the civil character was a disguise for a planned, creative party endeavour. Methodologically, the authors interpret the DF’s campaign, elaborating on process tracing and applying Tilly and Tarrow’s ‘contentious politics’ approach. They enquire into how the political-party background of the organizers influenced the unfolding of the contentious campaign, thereby addressing the role of parties as initiators of movements. This is especially pertinent in hybrid regimes with formally democratic institutions and persisting authoritarian practices. The Montenegrin case study of contentious (party) politics reveals that, while re- sources are available, the strong (ethno)political identity label of the party imposes constraints on the construction of a programmatic campaign. Alberto Sartori is a Junior Project Officer with the non-governmental organization Reggio Terzo Mondo (RTM) and is based in Shkodër, Albania. Joachim Pranzl is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna. Introduction This study analyses the anti-government campaign in Montenegro, which started in autumn 2015 when protesters took to the streets demanding free and fair elections. ‘Freedom Calling’ (Sloboda Traži Ljude) was a contentious campaign through which the Democratic Front (Demokratski Front, DF)—an alliance of oppositional parties—tried to engage political and civil-society ac- tors in a fresh attempt to challenge the long-standing rule of Milo Đukanović. The organizers drew from a recurrent theme of political contention in the country’s long postsocialist transformation, accusing the incumbent coalition, led by the Democratic Party of Socialists (Demokratska Partija Socialista, DPS), of widespread electoral manipulation and thus to be illegitimate. Indeed, op- position actors have employed non-institutional methods of countering DPS Contentious (Party) Politics in Montenegro 555 dominance in the past. Yet the attempt by ‘Freedom Calling’ to downplay its institutional characteristics and instead present itself as a grassroots social movement—or as the civil face of party politics—forms the campaign’s core endeavour, and offers a fascinating field of study. In order to analyse this civil face of party politics, the key interpretative approach of the present study draws on contentious politics, involving ‘inter- actions in which actors make claims bearing on other actors’ interests, leading to coordinated efforts on behalf of shared interests or programmes, in which governments are involved as targets, initiators of claims, or third parties’.1 In a nutshell: contention, collective action and politics are combined and their over- lap presents distinctive properties.2 By focusing on mechanisms and processes we investigate how the political party background of the organizers influenced the unfolding of the contentious campaign ‘Freedom Calling’ in Montenegro. The study starts by summarizing the existing contentious-politics literature in order to point at the lack of research on parties and movements in hybrid regimes. Subsequently, we explain why the concept of contentious politics is pertinent to our case and present the applied method and data collection. Thereafter, we address Montenegro’s political context and how the contentious campaign at hand unfolds in it. Lastly, we individuate outcomes and key find- ings, and touch on potential paths towards generalization. Contentious Campaigns in Hybrid Regimes In this section, we illustrate the benefits of a contentious politics approach to our case study. Most approaches to social movements focus on aspects such as collective identity, protests, resources, or collective action.3 A concept particu- larly relevant for our study is ‘political opportunity structure’, which highlights the importance of the political context by pointing to the mutual influences between state, institutions and movements.4 However, over time the often-narrow focus of these approaches to social movements became evident with the increasing complexity of forms of conten- The authors would like to thank Mathias Krams, Clara Moder, Tobias Spöri and Samuele Tonello, as well as three anonymous reviewers for their comments. All mistakes remain ours. Gratitude is also expressed to the University of Graz and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna for providing financial support in the pursuit of this research and publication. 1 Charles Tilly / Sidney G. Tarrow, Contentious Politics, New York/NY 22015, 7. 2 Tilly / Tarrow, Contentious Politics, 7-10. 3 Cf. the overviews in Bert Klandermans / Conny Roggeband, eds, Handbook of Social Movements Across Disciplines, New York/NY, London 2010; David A. Snow et al., eds, The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, Chichester, Malden/MA 2013 . 4 Hank Johnston, States and Social Movements, Cambridge 2011, 16. 556 Alberto Sartori and Joachim Pranzl tion that existed on the ground. Already in 2001, McAdam, Tilly and Tarrow had addressed the dynamic nature of contention by shifting their attention from political process theory towards what they call the mechanism-process approach 5. Their work has enabled researchers to draw ‘fruitful causal analogies’ across different settings of contention, going beyond the analysis of rather static variables to focus on causal mechanisms.6 To be sure, criticism of this approach surfaced rather quickly, for instance regarding the concept of mechanisms, which was seen as too positivist to be of value for the analysis of social phenomena.7 Responding to such criticism, Tilly and Tarrow have refined their approach and come up with their conceptualization of ‘contentious politics’ in 2007, and with a second, revised, edition in 2015. The concept of ‘contentious politics’ concentrates on relational mechanisms within contentious fields, for example when it comes to interactions between movements and institutional politics.8 It goes beyond the limitations of narrower concepts by putting emphasis on such questions as how contention is organized within particular cultural and political contexts, or how such aspects as resources, identities or opportunities may facilitate contention in a particular setting.9 Criticism of the concept of ‘contentious politics’ has often referred to its lack of clarity, as well as to its extensive attention to the state and subsequent neglect of other social actors. In addition, the downside of the aforementioned broader applicability has been pointed out: over-generalization is indeed a risk for such a ‘grand design’ concept, due to the great variety of potential cases within very different settings.10 Given that the authors give preference to labelling regimes as either Western liberal democracies or as authoritarian regimes, this latter flaw seems evident. Critics have highlighted the insufficiently differentiated relations 5 Doug McAdam / Sidney G. Tarrow / Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, Cambridge et al . 2001 . 6 Charles Tilly, Rhetoric, Social History, and Contentious Politics. Reply to Critics, Inter- national Review of Social History 49, no. 1 (2004), 132-141, 141, DOI: 10.1017/S0020859003001421. All internet references were accessed on 12 November 2018. 7 Cf. Zenonas Norkus, Mechanisms as Miracle Makers? The Rise and Inconsistencies of the ‘Mechanismic Approach’ in Social Science and History, History and Theory 44, no. 3 (2005), 348-372, DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2005.00329.x.; cf. the fruitful symposium debate as mirrored in Tulia G. Falleti / Julia Lynch, From Process to Mechanism. Varieties of Disaggregation, Qual- itative Sociology 31, no. 4 (2008), 333-339; and Mark Irving Lichbach, Modeling Mechanisms of Contention. MTT’s Positivist Constructivism, Qualitative Sociology 31, no. 4 (2008), 345-354; DOI: 10.1007/s11133-008-9104-2. 8 Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics, in: Donatella Della Porta / Mario Diani, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, Oxford, New York/NY 2015, 86-107, 87. 9 Suzanne Staggenborg, Seeing Mechanisms in Action, Qualitative Sociology 31, no. 4 (2008), 341-344, 341, DOI: 10.1007/s11133-008-9101-5. 10 Bert Klandermans, Book Review. Contentious Politics by Charles Tilly and Sidney Tar- row, Social Forces 86, no. 4 (2008), 1855-1857, DOI: 10.1353/sof.0.0034. Contentious (Party) Politics in Montenegro 557 between the concept and variations in regime type,11 resulting from both the inherent Western bias and a rather rigid characterization of regimes in general.12 Contentious politics substantially differs according to the regime type coun- tered .13 This is particularly important in systems not easily classified as either democratic or authoritarian, but which are better classified as hybrid, which means that they feature formal traits of liberal democracy coexisting with au- thoritarian practices.14 These hybrid forms had not been properly considered within the original concept as developed by Tarrow and Tilly. One attempt at differentiation outlines four categories of contention: consentful vs dissentful contention and consentful vs dissentful compliance, thus introducing in fact a new concept in order to address