The Rise of New Challenger Parties in Croatia: Party System Stability Endangered?

Ever since the introduction of democracy in 1990, party system in Croatia has been manifesting a rather stable patterns of party competition, voters’ behaviour, coalition building and government formation. Data on electoral volatility, party system fragmentation, party age, party membership, effective number of parties and party identification support the thesis on stability and persistence of party system in Croatia. In this paper I analyse what happened with this stability in the last 2015 and 2016 parliamentary elections. New challenger parties ‘The Bridge’ and ‘Human Shield’ raised very strong anti-establishment and populist demands against old parties and mobilized voters’ support which enabled ‘The Bridge’ even to become king-maker in government formation. Paper describes election's context and electoral results by analysing the individual determinants behind the change to the party system in Croatia. In order to find out what was behind electoral change and who votes for these new challenger parties, I shall analyse factors like socio-demographic, religiosity, left-right self-determination and the trust in representative institutions and democracy. It is expected that young voters who are politically disaffected are more prone to vote for the new parties, while ‘old’ voters who are mostly satisfied with the political situation remain loyal to the traditional parties.