New parties in Spain: a typology and some explanations

The financial crisis (an its subsequent political development) has generated a political turmoil in Southern European democracies, with deeply destabilising consequences for the national party systems. One of the main effects has been the rise of new political parties to the detriment of traditional forces in both left and right. In some cases, the new organizations have been incepted from traditional parties, while other have benefited from the civil society movements or the rise of what has been called ‘identity politics’. Although theoretical approaches have attempted to explain the creation of new parties as a response to electoral market failures, there has been scarce attention to distinguish amongst different sources or origins of party inception. Our paper aims to observe whether these new parties follow a top-down pattern of creation (existing party elites split from traditional parties to form new organizations) or rather a bottom-up pattern (new elites emerging thorough completely new parties). The type of origin could be a crucial factor of differences amongst new parties in terms of organization, programme or even mass mobilization strategies. This is why our paper will try to elaborate a typology of new parties. We will analyse the case of Spain, one of the more relevant case of party system change in Southern Europe recently. In the last five years, 26 parties have been created every month on average, although most of them have never reached the electoral threshold. Instead, the paper will focus on those Spanish new parties incepted in the last ten years that have achieved parliamentary representation at the European, national or even regional level.