New Kids on the Block?! The Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic on New Party Entry

Despite its grip of the world over the last months, Covid-19 is a fairly new world phenomenon, which provides multiple challenges to all countries alike. Even the strongest of democracies, with established crisis management plans, years of experience in handling political and economic crises, are shaken in the face of the pandemic. In the midst of the pandemic’s rampant effects on every aspect of our lives, how politicians handle the crisis is of crucial importance to the preservation, development, and protection of nations in the future. Research has already looked into the effect of partisanship on social mobility, political finance reforms, and personal election success in particular pockets of society, yet we have no comparative evidence of how the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has affected party systems overall. Building on the party systems literature and extending these new Covid-related studies, we study the rerlation of the pandemic on party system development. In particular, we are interested about the effect of the pandemic on party system permeability in light of new contestants. We expect to see fewer new parties entering the electoral race where the incumbent government handles the crisis more effectively. We draw on evidence from national elections held around the world since spring 2020 to test this hypothesis.