The study investigates new political parties in Poland as organisational mechanisms of elite recruitment and circulation rather than merely electoral competitors. Recent scholarship conceptualises party novelty not only in electoral terms but also in organisational and systemic dimensions. Building on theories of party institutionalisation, professionalisation, and personalisation, as well as research on political careers, the study treats parties as career structures that either retain political elites or channel them into the broader political system.
Contemporary studies increasingly show that many challenger parties operate as personalised or project-based organisations with weak internal career ladders. This organisational form may facilitate elite mobility rather than organisational consolidation. The study, therefore, asks whether new parties in Poland build durable political careers or instead serve as entry platforms (“springboards”) into politics. Using a cohort-based dataset of selected parliamentary candidates, the study traces career trajectories over time through cohort analysis and elements of event history analysis, complemented by a flow analysis of party switching across political institutions.
The central hypothesis proposes that new parties rarely sustain stable political careers but instead serve as adaptive mechanisms of party system stabilisation by recruiting and redistributing political elites. The study thus aims to contribute to research on party system institutionalisation in Central and Eastern Europe by demonstrating that organisational fragility of new parties may coexist with systemic stability.
