Short-Term Success or Substantial Shift? A Comparative Analysis of Origin, Formation and Institutionalization of New Parties in Greece and Spain

Recent years have been eventful for party democracy in the Southern European countries. Since 2015 parliamentary elections led to the national breakthrough of numerous new parties – especially in Greece and Spain. Parties from the whole political spectrum, such as To Potami, ANEL or Syriza in Greece as well as Equo, Ciudadanos or Podemos in Spain became politically relevant or even participated in a coalition government. This paper examines origin, formation and institutionalization of new parties in Greece and Spain. Building on previous work, I follow the maximalist approach in understanding party institutionalization as a process, that goes beyond electoral success and parliamentary seat distribution and includes “internal”, “external” and “objective” dimensions, and ask: How do newcomers perform on the internal, external and objective dimensions? And which dimension(s) matters most for the parties’ re-election after its national breakthrough? In pursuit of these questions, the paper theorizes objective, internal and external dimensions of party institutionalization, with different indicators each and with a focus on the internal indicator ‘routinization’. That is the behavior of party elites and membership base according to regulated procedures rather than the whims of a leader or party founder. I specifically hypothesize that the national parliamentary survival after the following election depends (1) on a party’s type of formation and its origin before entering parliament and (2) on its ability to establish routinized internal party decision-making processes. To empirically test the hypotheses I make the case for a mixed-methods research design and inspect political parties from Spain (Equo, Podemos, Ciudadanos) and Greece (ANEL, Syriza, To Potami), that were formed in different ways (initiated by individual entrepreneurs, promoted by existing societal organizations or former political movements) and based on different origins (newly born parties, splinter parties as well as mergers). The paper draws on data collected as part of the “New Parties in Europe”-project, including expert surveys, primary party documents, information from the parties’ websites and twitter as well as interviews with Greek and Spanish party representatives and country experts.