The Influence of Established Parties on the Success of New Contenders.

Scholars have examined the reasons for the electoral success of new parties for decades now. Studies on the emergence of new parties differ in methodology, scope, and key explanatory variables. By now, we have in-depth knowledge about the influence of institutional factors like the electoral system, which can be summarized as the “cost of entry” (Tavits 2006) for new parties. However, these studies try to ascribe the variance of the count of new parties to system-level variables like population heterogeneity, openness of the electoral system, or the degree of federalism, which are all time-invariant over longer periods. Therefore, those variables are not suitable to understand change in a conceptual way. Thus, other variables, like voter demands and supply of political positions (Zons 2013; Franzmann 2011; Robertson 1976) that exhibit time variance have to be taken into account. This study focuses on the behavior of old parties vis-à-vis new contenders on the political stage. Thereby, the paper contributes to the empirical question: How does the arrival of new contenders influence the behavior of old parties? Loosely based on Meguid (2005) three types of party behavior can be differentiated: i) The “neglecters”, who do not change their program; ii) the “adopters”, who take positions of new parties into account and modify their manifesto; and iii) the “confronters”, who emphasize an opposite standpoint to new parties. This study analyzes these strategies in 23 OECD countries from 1944 to 2014, providing insight in the dynamics of party competition and both a theoretical explanation and empirical evidence to those factors allowing a newly emerged political party to institutionalize its initial success. We use CMP data to calculate a new measure of the adaptiveness of established parties. Furthermore, we integrate public opinion data to control for voter preferences. These variables are key explanatory factors for the vote share of the new party. Results of the time-series cross-section analysis show that the strategies of established parties have a significant influence on the success of new parties and thus can exacerbate or facilitate the growth of a new party into an established institutionalized player. New parties face major problems if their program is – at least partly - coopted by established parties in the same political spectrum. However, this strategy does not suit everyone: Depending on the new party’s political manifesto, the scope of actions available to existing parties is limited. The analysis shows that voters do not reward exaggerated policy moves that ignore a party’s current ideological alignment or voter preferences. The observed strategies yield important insights about the dynamics of party competition in advanced democracies and help to understand why the count of new parties varies while institutional arrangements remain static. This finding is important for the scientific debate about the institutionalization of new political parties as well as for those actively involved in political competition.