New Parties in Electoral Competition: Examining the Formation of New Political Actors

Parties play an important role in representative democracies. They aggregate societal demands, contest at elections, and recruit political personnel. It thus comes with little surprise that political scientists have drawn considerable interest in analysing parties and explaining government formation, duration and termination processes. However, much less is known about the entry of new parties into the party system. Therefore, the present paper analyses the factors that explain the emergence of new relevant parties. In this study, new relevant political actors are parties that reach legislative representation at any election following its registration as a party. Based on Cox (1997) theory of strategic entry, I focus on the benefits and costs that might influence political entry decisions. In contrast to previous studies that coded the year of election as entry date, my party formation variable refers to the year that the new actor actually was born. This operationalisation is independent from an election and I contend that it complies more closely with the theoretical argument of rational cost-benefit decisions made by potential new parties. Furthermore, I propose a new measure of benefits by looking at a parliamentary power index (Fisch and Kroenig 2009). The data come from the formation of new actors in fifteen Western European democracies (1990-2017). The multivariate models show that new party formation is more likely in systems with stronger legislative power and lower entry costs. These findings contribute to our understanding of changing party systems and representative democracies. Literature Cox, Gary 1997. Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World’s Electoral Systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Fish, Steven M. and Matthew Kroenig 2009. The Handbook of National Legislatures. A Global Survey. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.