In the past decades, the establishment of new political parties has shaped the faces of many European party systems. In a first noticeable push, green parties have gained parliamentary representation in many national assemblies. More recently, particularly radical right wing parties have newly emerged, transforming the political landscapes. Consequently, the establishment of new political parties has gained increasing scholarly attention.
The emergence of new parties is mainly investigated on a macro level, employing political parties or party system as observational units. Studies in this tradition provided insights into long-term trends in the society and their influence on the party system, distinguishable attributes of new parties and into the institutional factors that facilitate or impede party system dynamics. As the establishment of a party is by definition tied to electoral success of some extent, each of these macro-level studies are based explicitly or implicitly on assumptions about behavior of individual voters. Yet, micro-level analyses that observe changes in voter behavior as a reaction to the emergence of new political parties are scarce. This paper connects hypotheses on party emergence with theories on voter behavior; vote switching in particular.
The literature on vote switching is historically divided into an optimistic camp which views the floating voters as an ideal type citizen of high sophistication that freshly makes up his or her mind again at each election, based on the political parties´ prior performance and their policy offerings. The more pessimistic approach describes the floating voters as similar to sand drift. As a consequence of little political knowledge, these voters are easily swayed from one direction to the other. Combined with the observations of increasing dealignment and political distrust in European societies, the pessimistic perspective leads to the hypothesis of the frustrated floating voter, who wholeheartedly welcomes each and every newly emerging party, irrespective of policy positions. As this group of voters grew in size, the emergence of new political parties have become more likely in the recent past.
These mechanisms will be investigated on micro-level, employing adequate data source that observe a voter´s attitudes and behavior over a longer time period within a changing political environment. For this effort, long-term panel-data of the German Longitudinal Election Study is employed. The case of Germany is particularly useful, because its party system has seen the emergence of three new political parties (The Left, The Pirate Party, AfD) in the course of only 11 years. By making use of this unique data source, this study strives for new insights into the characteristics of the supporters of new parties and the conditions of party emergence.
