Social Movements Versus Frozen Democracy: The Albanian Perspective

The main goal of the article is to identify the role of social and political movements and non-political forms of participating within a democratic system. Albania as a young democracy had been under organizational fragmentation. Albania has a stable political party system, but its society faces a chaotic development towards the democratization process. In this paper the main aim is to explain the role of social cleavages and social movements in a young democracy like Albania. The relationship between social movements and the political party system will be viewed from two perspectives: a) the relative openness or closure of the institutionalized political system; and b) how non-conventional forms of participation, such as a protest, can be part of policy-making. The paper is structured into two main parts, the first one deals with the theoretical approaches towards social movements and social cleavages and the second one relates to the Albanian perspective and its socio-political background.