Party Novelty: Comparative Study of Party Change and Renewal in the EU

This paper discusses the concept of party novelty, presents a new Party Novelty Dataset, and studies what affects the degree of party novelty across European states from 1989 to 2009. Since party novelty measures party change and renewal, the paper attempts to test a few hypotheses from the party development literature as to what affects party change and party formation using party novelty data. First, this paper defines party novelty as the quality that reflects the degree of change within party organization. Novelty shows how new a particular party is. It is argued that at any given time any single party has some degree of novelty. This paper assumes that the universe of changes that parties undergo can be arrayed on a two dimensional continuum. First dimension represents the change of party attributes, such as party name, leader, or program, while the second one represents structural changes that parties undergo, such as mergers, splits, startups, and others. In order to measure party novelty in a systematic fashion, the study uses the Party Novelty Database developed by the researcher. It records the change in attributes and organizational structure of national parties that participate in the elections to the EU parliament from 1989 to 2009. The study was designed in such a way that each case represents a party per electoral cycle. It total it includes about 500 cases in 65 electoral contexts covering four EU elections (1994, 1999, 2004, and 2009) in 24 European countries. The paper will show how common is the case in which a party alters its name or undergoes other transformations and how party change is distributed across time and countries.