How New Parties Disappear

The rise of new parties, more specifically, how they are formed in contemporary democracies and why, has attracted a lot of attention in research. How and why new parties disappear, i.e. cease to participate in elections as autonomous competitors, though a frequent phenomenon, has been little theorised or empirically examined. Parties can disappear as a consequence of their own vulnerability, e.g. resource shortages or the inability to mobilise a sufficient following and dissolve. Alternatively, they can disappear by giving up their organisational autonomy and form an altogether new organisation by merging with other competitors in order to improve their strategic position in their party system. Meanwhile, the latter form of disappearance might be systematically linked to parties’ propensity to dissolve and function as a ‘preventive’ measure. This paper theorises and empirically examines these different forms of disappearing, their determinants and their (possible) interconnectedness using a new dataset of new party trajectories in 21 consolidated democracies. More specifically, using hierarchical systematically dependent competing and semi-competing risk models, it explores the interactions of resource-related explanatory factors for party disappearance (e.g. seat share, access to party funding) with identity-related factors (party novelty), factors whose effects on party performance have to date be predominantly examined in isolation.