Against All: the Rise of New Parties in New and Established Democracies

Democracies across the world have experienced the rise of political outsiders: After recent elections, completely new political parties have accessed government in countries as diverse as France, Greece, Bulgaria or the Czech Republic, or emerged as strong opposition parties in Spain or Italy. Electoral turnover is not a new phenomenon. Particularly, in the context of economic recession, incumbents tend to lose electoral grounds. However, in the common view of the model of (retrospective) economic voting, there was the implicit believe that the main beneficiary of electoral change is the established opposition (with some remarkable exceptions, e.g. Benton 2005; Powell and Tucker 2014). This paper is interested in the beneficiaries of electoral change: when do electoral losses of the incumbent benefit the established opposition parties, and when do they benefit new political parties? The theoretical model, on which this paper builds, differentiate between different (macro-economic and macro-political) motives for electoral change, as well as several contextual factors: voter-party linkages, the electoral rules, as well as democratic vs. authoritarian legacies. In a nutshell, economic motives for electoral turnover benefit the established opposition, as voters look for an established alternative within the political system. Differently, corruption discredits the entire political establishment, and benefits the rise of new parties, though the effect is nuanced by the age of democracy and voter-party linkages. Empirically, this argument requires data across a large number of democracies of different age, and over a series of elections. This paper uses a new dataset on electoral change in democracies worldwide since 1990, covering 59 countries from Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America, Oceania and Asia. Preliminary findings support our hypotheses. Benton, Allyson Lucinda. 2005. 'Dissatisfied Democrats or Retrospective Voters? Economic Hardship, Political Institutions, and Voting Behavior in Latin America.' Comparative Political Studies 38 (4):417-42. Powell, Eleanor Neff, and Joshua A. Tucker. 2014. 'Revisiting Electoral Volatility in Post-Communist Countries: New Data, New Results and New Approaches.' British Journal of Political Science 44 (1):123-47.