In recent years, established party systems in the advanced industrial democracies have been challenged at many levels. New issues, new parties and party families have emerged and electorates are significantly less loyal to the ‘old’ parties than they once were. According to the authors of the ‘Cartel Party’ theory, the new uncertain situation created incentives for established parties to protect their positions by adopting regulation in their own favor (Katz&Mair, 1995). The aim of this paper is to investigate whether government regulation can actually be seen to influence the entry of new parties. Comparative studies of new parties in advanced industrial democracies have provided many valuable insights into the role government regulation plays for the electoral participation and long term survival of parties (e.g. Hug 2001, Bischoff 2011, Bolleyer&Bytzek 2013). We know little about whether it matters to the number of parties that have some measure of success at elections, however.
This study attempts to fill this gap. It defines ‘success’ in electoral and representational terms, but not in relation to subsequent influence in parliament. As institutional or socio-economic variables are unlikely to determine exactly ‘how successful’ new parties are (factors such as domestic debates or leadership charisma probably play a more decisive role for this), the dependent variables of the study are the number of new parties that win over 1 and 4 per cent of the votes and seats respectively. The empirical analysis tests a model that includes government regulation as well as other relevant institutional and socio-economic variables expected to influence the number of new successful parties. For the analysis, an original data-set comprising 359 elections to the lower houses of parliament in 21 advanced industrial democracies in the period 1950-2010 is used.
