Revisiting new party success: a comparative analysis of young and consolidated democracies

As voters' discontent with the performance of mainstream political parties grows so do the chances of new parties to gain parliamentary representation (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000). This relationship is usually mediated by two types of factors. First, scholars have emphasized the role played by institutional context in shaping the opportunity structure faced by new parties. This refers mainly to electoral system features such as the degree of proportionality or the size of the electoral threshold, but also to constitutional arrangements such as parliamentarism vs. presidentialism (Harmel and Robertson 1985; Hino 2012). A second category of relevant factors pertain to economic and sociological characteristics: from short-term economic conditions such as the level of unemployment or inflation (Tavits 2007) to more profound societal aspects such as the appearance of new dimensions of conflict (Rydgren 2003). The present paper revisits the explanatory power of these theories, while also testing two new hypotheses regarding the age of democracy and the degree of government instability. While older democracies are expected to see fewer parties breaking through in the parliament, cabinet changes and governmental instability can be perceived by political entrepreneurs as a window of opportunity to launch new parties capable to capitalize on the crisis. For this purpose we compiled an original dataset of new parties that entered parliaments in 37 democracies from 1960 to 2015. Unlike existing studies which have either concentrated on the success of new parties in advanced industrial democracies (Bolleyer and Bytzek 2013; Bolin 2014), or looked only at the participation in elections of new parties in young democracies (Tavits 2007), this paper makes an additional step by also analyzing new parliamentary party entries in young democracies, mainly from the post-communist space. Our preliminary multivariate regression analyses corroborated both hypotheses. Moreover, since the age of democracy is a major predictor of new party success, we also investigate in more depth the differences emerging between the trajectories of new parties in young compared to consolidated democracies. The former category does not lack variation: in Latvia or Slovenia new parties are constantly able to gather up to 30% of the vote, whereas in Romania and Hungary successful new parties are extremely rare. Bolin, N. (2014). New party parliamentary entry in Western Europe, 1960-2010. European Journal of Government and Economics, 3(1), 05-23. Bolleyer, N., & Bytzek, E. (2013). Origins of party formation and new party success in advanced democracies. European Journal of Political Research,52(6), 773-796. Harmel, R., & Robertson, J. D. (1985) ‘Formation and Success of New Parties - A Cross National Analysis’, International Political Science Review, 6(4): 501-523. Hino, A. (2012) New Challenger Parties in Western Europe. A Comparative Analysis. London: Routledge. Lewis-Beck, M. S. & Stegmaier, M. (2000). ‘Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes’, Annual Reviews of Political Science, 3, 183–219 Rydgren, J. (2003) The Populist Challenge: Political Protest and Ethno-Nationalist Mobilization in France. New York: Berghahn Books. Tavits, M. (2008). Party systems in the making: The emergence and success of new parties in new democracies. British Journal of Political Science,38(01), 113-133.