Not-so-new Beginnings and the fate of new Parties: A foolproof plan?

The recurring emergence of new parties in the last three decades heralded a dearth of research on its effect on long-established party systems, which were deemed either stable or in flux, depending on the electoral tenacity of the newcomers. However, this emphasis leads to neglecting a party’s origin and its degree of ‘newness’ in determining its persistence/early demise. As Peter Mair (1999: 217) so succinctly put it, there is a distinction between “old wine in new bottles” and “new wine in whatever sort of container modern tastes might find appealing”. The impact of a party’s origin on those ‘containers’ is the focus of this paper. In order to turn the concept of a party’s origin into an independent variable with exclusive categories, Panebianco’s genetic model (1988) is modified using four cases so it distinguishes between a party built from scratch, a minor splinter party that broke away from a mother party, a party conceived by merging two or more pre-existing parties, and a party that can claim to be the sole successor after a predecessor’s dissolution. The parties used for building this model are, respectively, Party for the Animals (PvdD), Flemish Interest (VB), GreenLeft (GL), and New-Flemish Alliance (N-VA). Both Belgian cases, VB and N-VA, originated from the same party but were built at different moments in time and in different circumstances. Both Dutch cases, PvdD and GL, can be categorised as green parties but their histories bear few resemblances. The qualitative comparison of the four cases will explore the assumption that building a new party on the remains of another one allows a party to have its cake and eat it too: the strength of pre-existing foundations combined with the excitement of being new as a recipe for success.