Origins of party formation and new party success inadvanced democracies
NICOLE BOLLEYER1 & EVELYN BYTZEK2
1Department of Politics, University of Exeter, UK; 2Department of Political Science,
University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Abstract. Which new parties entered national parliaments in advanced democracies overthe last four decades and how did they perform after their national breakthrough? Thisarticle argues that distinguishing two types of party formation (that facilitate or complicateparty institutionalisation) helps to explain why some entries flourish, while others vanishquickly from the national stage. New parties formed by individual entrepreneurs that cannotrely on ties to already organised groups are less likely to get reelected to parliament afterbreakthrough than rooted newcomers.This hypothesis is tested on a newly compiled datasetof new parties that entered parliaments in 17 advanced democracies from 1968 onwards.Applying multilevel analyses, the factors that shape newcomers’ capacity to reenter parlia-ment after breakthrough are assessed. Five factors have significant effects, yet affect partyperformance only in particular phases: both a party’s electoral support at breakthrough andits operation in a system with a strong regional tier increase the likelihood of initial reelec-tion. In contrast, a distinct programmatic profile, the permissiveness of the electoral systemand easy access to free broadcasting increase a party’s chance of repeated reelection. Onlyformation type significantly affects both phases and does so most strongly, substantiating thetheoretical approach used in this article.
Keywords: party formation; party success; party organisation; institutionalisation; multilevelanalysis
Introduction: The rise of new parties in advanced democracies andtheir sustainability
Only a fraction of new parties ever gains national parliamentary representa-tion. Over the last decades, however, more and more newcomers havemanaged to overcome this hurdle and to increase their vote share signifi-cantly.1 Yet although a party’s national breakthrough is considered as a majorevent in every party’s history (e.g., Pedersen 1982; Lucardie 2000; Krouwel &Lucardie 2008) and by now cross-national research increasingly deals with theeffects of government participation on new parties (e.g., Deschouwer 2008;McDonnell & Newell 2011), one fundamental puzzle remains still unresolvedin the study of new parties in advanced democracies: For which new parties
European Journal of Political Research 52: 773–796, 2013 773doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12013
does parliamentary entry form the start of a longer career in the national arenaand which ones stay there only briefly and why? It is by no means automaticthat a new party can exploit its entry success in its favour. Some parties fadeaway quietly having failed to reenter parliament early on, while others spec-tacularly disintegrate after breakthrough – a less frequent but much morenoticed fate (e.g., Aylott 1995; Lucardie & Ghillebaert 2008). Whether newparties can defend their niche after having entered parliament is essential toevaluate whether their entry introduces substantive change in consolidatedparty systems, rather than remaining a punctual expression of citizen dissatis-faction and protest. In an attempt to address this question, we argue that thestructural conditions in which new parties are formed facilitate or complicateparty institutionalisation and, therefore, constitute an important factor thatneeds to be considered when accounting for newcomers’ diverse performancepatterns.
Since a long-term presence on the national level is one important indicationof new parties’ relevance, the natural focus of existing studies has been onthose parties that have stayed around. Green parties, for instance, a new partyfamily, whose members have shown a considerable capacity to attract andconsolidate support (e.g., Poguntke 2002), have received considerable atten-tion, as did the new radical or populist right later on, whose members –although as a group less sustainable (e.g., Carter 2005; Mudde 2007) – attractedsignificant vote shares in a range of Western democracies. New left parties, incontrast, are rarely the subject of systematic comparative analysis (but seeDunphy & Bale 2011). This focus has two methodological implications. First,starting out with a focus on specific party families restricts our capacity toexplore broader conditions for the sustainability of new parties after break-through, especially since this focus, in practice, implies a focus on successfulcases, while leaving out a wide range of failure cases.2 Second, a focus on partyfamilies that are ideologically new or distinct from the ‘mainstream offer’limits our ability to explore which of the majority of new entries that emulatemainstream ideologies succeed or fail, and why they do so.
To circumvent these problems, we start out from a conception of newparties as ‘organisationally new’, detach our criteria for case selection – that is,our definition of ‘newness’ – from parties’ programmatic profiles and focus ontheir relative organisational (im)maturity instead. To explore party perform-ance after national breakthrough, we look at those new parties that have wona seat in the first house of their national parliament at least once (irrespectiveof vote shares or programmatic profile) across 17 advanced democracies. The120 new parties that meet these criteria, and are thus included in our analyses,assure the coverage of a wide range of performance trajectories including thevariety of failure cases. Further, we avoid the starting assumption that new
parties only succeed when representing new or neglected issues, which mightlead to the bypassing of otherwise relevant cases. New parties might ‘wilfullyfight on already occupied territory’ and still be successful – a possibility rec-ognised in the study of new democracies but rarely explicitly considered in thecontext of established democracies (Sikk 2011: 3).
This conceptual choice is equally essential in light of the explanatory goalof this article – the exploration of factors driving new parties’ sustainability inthe national arena after their parliamentary breakthrough, rather than account-ing for parliamentary entry (e.g., Krouwel & Lucardie 2008) or entry intonational elections (e.g., Hug 2001, Tavits 2006). Deliberately shifting the ana-lytical focus to new party sustainability on the national level during a particu-larly vulnerable phase of party development, we argue that a party’s capacityto rely on ties to societal groups which pre-date a newcomer’s formation,so-called ‘promoter organisations’, make it more likely that a party is able tosustain support after parliamentary breakthrough.
In the following, we justify our empirical focus on new party sustainabilityafter parliamentary breakthrough. Drawing on the theoretical literature, weidentify party origin as a condition that affects the likelihood of a new party toinstitutionalise and thus to be sustainable. After having introduced our con-ception of ‘newness’, specified our measure of party origin and introduced arange of controls, the influence of party origin is tested on the basis of agenuinely new dataset comprising new parties across 17 advanced democra-cies. We conclude with the broader repercussions of our findings.
Why study new party sustainability after breakthrough?
Case studies suggest that we cannot conclude from a party’s breakthroughsuccess its medium- and long-term performance as the dramatic disintegrationof newcomers that entered parliaments with extensive vote shares,3 and theresilience of those new parties that never won more than a few vote percent-ages,4 illustrate. To account for these discrepancies systematically, we focus onparty sustainability – defined as the capacity of a new party to sustain initialsupport (which allowed it to enter national parliament in the first place) tosuch an extent that a party can reenter parliament and thereby maintain anational presence. Initial failure after parliamentary entry has long-lastingconsequences and comebacks are rare, mirroring our conceptualisation of newparties as ‘organisationally new’. Their common denominator is the lack of afully developed and consolidated infrastructure, which is most pronounced inthe early stages of a newcomer’s career. Further, we look at sustainability interms of maintaining access to the parliamentary arena (and the resources
ORIGINS OF PARTY FORMATION AND NEW PARTY SUCCESS 775
attached to this – e.g., parliamentary assistants, parliamentary subsidies, mediaattention), access which all parties in our analysis have at least achieved once,to assure comparability across cases. The capacity of assuring reelection, andthus parliamentary representation, is more clear-cut and immediately compa-rable than relative vote gains or losses, which have different repercussions fora party’s resource access depending on the institutional setting (e.g., electoralthresholds).
Sustainability, party institutionalisation and the importance ofparty origin
Attempting to account for party sustainability rather than short-term perform-ance,some existing studies stress the importance of organisational factors. In hisseminal study on the new populist right,Mudde (2007) argued that organisationis particularly likely to play an important role for its capacity to exploit its initialsuccess effectively by assuring the party’s functioning in public office andprotecting its support base. Simultaneously, seminal studies on party develop-ment indicate that the origin of parties shapes their evolution in the medium andlong terms by influencing whether and to what extent parties institutionalise(Duverger 1981; Panebianco 1988). ‘Institutionalisation’ denotes a process bywhich party followers develop an interest in the survival of a party as such,independent of its current leadership (Panebianco 1988:18–20,53–55).Throughan increasing routinisation, intra-organisational processes become more rule-guided and less dominated by the idiosyncratic choices of leaders – a processwhich consolidates decision making (Panebianco 1988: 49, 53).Value infusion –another dimension of institutionalisation – results from party members’ andparty representatives’ emotional attachment to the party (Levitsky 1998: 79).Both dimensions affect how well a party as an organisation can cope with thepressures of public office by improving its capacities of coordination andconflict-resolution and decreasing the likelihood of defections.
If, as argued in the literature, institutionalisation helps a party to function asan organisation facing conflicting pressures, one can plausibly expect a party’sorigin to affect new party sustainability as far as formative conditions are likelyto support the institutionalisation of a newly formed party. While Panebianco(1988) stresses the importance of party origin, reflecting his focus on long-established parties, he considers the emancipation of parties from externalgroup support as part of a successful institutionalisation process. Being moreconcerned with the sustainability of new parties, the literature on (less devel-oped) parties in new democracies indicates that external group support canhelp still fluid party organisations to stabilise a support base instead (Randall& Svåsand 2002).
The latter perspective leads us to distinguish two very different starting-points for new party development: parties formed by individual entrepreneurs5
and rooted party formations. Reflecting the same rationale, in a comparativestudy of the Norwegian and the Danish Progress Party, Harmel and Svåsand(1993) introduced the concept of the ‘entrepreneurial party’: new partiesfounded by individuals who are not affiliated to already organised groups. Thecounter-image of entrepreneurial newcomers are new parties supported byalready existing organisations or groups, which promote the new formationand contribute resources to build a party infrastructure – a type of structuralback-up that is most crucial in the early years of a party’s evolution when aparty is particularly vulnerable. While Green parties supported by environ-mental movements spring to mind as core examples (e.g., Kitschelt 1989;Poguntke 2002), the variety of promoter organisations for rooted new partiesis wide, ranging from fascist groups, nationalist movements, religious groups orunions, to extremist groupings on the left (e.g., Duverger 1981; Poguntke 2006;Allern & Bale 2011; Art 2011).
In essence, we expect rooted new parties to be more sustainable since theyare more likely to institutionalise. The theoretical rationale is straightforward:party institutionalisation is costly. It requires the set-up of effective screeningand recruitment mechanisms able to select loyal as well as capable followersand candidates for public office.According to Wellhofer and Hennessey (1974:138–139), the selection of a social base from which to recruit is a crucial phasein a party’s development. Similar to Panebianco (1988), they portray thisselection on behalf of a party’s founding elite as an open one. Quite often,however, a party’s social base is, at least in part, predefined by those partyfounders’ backgrounds, their affiliation to some already existing groups andsocial organisations. This naturally affects the social base which can be ‘cred-ibly’ chosen by founding elites. This can be read as a constraint on the found-ers’ leeway but once one considers that new parties tend to initially operate ina context of scarcity, such ties form a crucial resource exploitable for partyinstitutionalisation. These ties provide access to a pool of committed activistsable to fill positions in the new party and to run for (and possibly perform in)public office. Due to followers’ already established group affiliations, they aremore inclined to identify with the newly formed party and such a basic emo-tional attachment makes their behaviour more predictable.They are less likelyto defect even at stages when the party as organisation is still underdeveloped– an orientation which institutionalisation, in the form of value infusion, issupposed to generate.
The affiliation to promoter groups functions as a first ‘natural pre-selectionmechanism’ for a party that initially has very little capacity to weedout opportunists. Furthermore, the ability to recruit people who have the
ORIGINS OF PARTY FORMATION AND NEW PARTY SUCCESS 777
experience to operate in other social organisations is advantageous for routini-sation since they are used to following certain procedures and likely to possessbasic managerial skills. Finally, ties to groups that predate party formation arelikely to have implications for the orientation of the founders who are supposedto initiate an institutionalisation process (Krouwel & Lucardie 2008: 282–283).This is important since we cannot simply assume that ‘leaders will emerge tomeet the demands of the [party] organizational imperative’ (Wellhofer &Hennessey 1974: 139). Founding actors with leadership aspirations and simul-taneous affiliations to societal organisations (which often represent broadercollective interests that require political representation in the longer run) areless likely to be only interested in the newly formed party as far, and as long as,it fosters their individual careers, which is the dominant orientation in manyentrepreneurial new parties.They are less likely to be short-term-oriented andmore likely to actively invest in their party’s institutionalisation – an orientationamong founding actors we cannot simply assume since institutionalisation iscostly and often pays off only in the medium and long terms.
In empirical terms, institutionalisation is a complex process that is difficultto measure directly, leaving in-depth single cases or (relatively) small-N com-parisons aside (e.g., Janda 1983; Harmel & Svåsand 1993; De Lange & Art2011; Bolleyer et al. 2012). However, the literature suggests that the prospectsof successful institutionalisation are systematically shaped by the structuralconditions in which a new party is formed, which, in turn, can be capturedacross a wider range of cases. On that basis, our analysis examines whethernew parties that are formed with the support of societal organisations areindeed more likely to sustain support after parliamentary breakthrough than‘entrepreneurs’.
Measurement and data
Specifying organisationally new parties
We define ‘newness’ in terms of parties’ organisational development ratherthan the newness of the issues that they represent. Organisationally newparties still need to build a viable, self-sufficient infrastructure consolidated bya (relatively) stable support base, which makes these parties more vulnerablethan, and thus distinct from, the group of established or ‘organisationallymature’ parties.6 To operationalise ‘organisational newness’ in line with thiscore feature, we follow Hug (2001) and classify parties as new if they are builtfrom scratch (‘newly born’) or if they originate from minor splits of establishedparties. To assure a sufficiently homogeneous sample, we exclude successor
parties including those that grew out of major factions of established parties(Arter 2010)7 and mergers of old parties that start out from several establishedparty organisations (see for a more inclusive approach, Mair 1999).8 We furtherexclude mergers between old and organisationally new parties, wheneverold parties have in effect ‘swallowed’ the remainders of organisationallynew parties – so-called ‘unbargained mergers’ (Ware 2009: 106–107) whichare ‘new’ formations that are, in effect, an organisational continuation ofestablished parties.9 Reflecting our main criterion, we included only thosemergers in which organisationally new parties have actively participated andwhich, at the time of formation, still needed to build a viable, self-sufficientinfrastructure.10
The basic vulnerability of new parties as relatively immature organisationsis particularly important to a party’s evolution when the latter is confrontedwith new challenges and pressures.This is the case when a party enters nationalparliament. While parliamentary entry constitutes a significant short-termsuccess and opens access to new resources, organisationally new parties are notonly less consolidated but also less experienced in holding public office thanestablished parties.As argued earlier, the exposure to new functional pressures(e.g., involvement in law making) combined with intense media scrutiny caneasily have destabilising effects, which is why this event is so important in aparty’s life cycle. Reflecting our analytical focus on organisationally new partyperformance in the decisive phase after their national breakthrough, we lookat the subset of organisationally new parties that have won seats in theirnational parliament at least once.11
We identified new formations meeting these two criteria from 1968onwards12 – a period when citizens’ party affiliations, underpinning formerly‘frozen party systems’ in advanced democracies, started to de-align (e.g., Lipset& Rokkan 1967; Bartolini & Mair 2007). The increasing flexibility of voters’choices created a ‘window of opportunity’ for new party entry and thus theirsustainability, showing in higher numbers of newly formed parties participat-ing in national elections, entering national parliaments and defending a nicheon the national level (e.g., Mair 1997; Hug 2001). Since then, accounting for theconditions that allowed some new parties to sustain a national presence hasgained increasing importance.
Operationalising sustainability after parliamentary breakthrough
Party sustainability on the national level (or any other level) – the capacity tosustain initial support to such an extent that it reassures reelection to parlia-ment – is inevitably a relative phenomenon. If parties are by definition mortal(Pedersen 1982), their life can end after one reelection or after 15. At the very
ORIGINS OF PARTY FORMATION AND NEW PARTY SUCCESS 779
least, one reelection after breakthrough indicates that a new party successfullycompeted at another national election, and more fundamentally, managed tocontinue to persist as a party (i.e., participated in the election) in the firstplace.13 The exposure to the new responsibilities and pressures coming withparliamentary public office did not have an immediately disintegrating effect.This threshold, however, is fairly low. Even if party performance in parliamentis weak during the first term in office, voters, aware of the party’s inexperience,might still give the party a second chance – a tolerance that is likely to decreasethe longer a new party is represented nationally. Repeated reelection afterbreakthrough is less likely the result of the generosity of voters and more likelyan indication that the party adapted to the challenges of operating in parlia-ment and selling its achievements during campaigns reasonably well.
If these two hurdles are indeed qualitatively different as we theorise, theyshould be shaped by different factors.To examine this, we ran two models withdifferent dependent variables: one dependent variable capturing whether new-comers failed immediately (‘reelect1’: grouping new parties that are reelectedonce or twice against those that are not reelected at all – that is, failed imme-diately) and one capturing whether newcomers reached sustainability to theextent that they were reelected twice (‘reelect2’: grouping new entries that arereelected twice against those that are not).
Data and first overview
Our analysis focuses on new parties operating in established party systems toassure a basic comparability of the challenges new parties face when trying tocarve out a niche (a situation that is substantially different if the majority ofrival parties are new as well).14 More specifically, our dataset covers organisa-tionally new parties that entered their national parliament in 17 advanceddemocracies15 (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France,Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand,Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) that, reflecting ourtwo dependent variables, participated or had the chance to participate in atleast two elections after their national breakthrough. This leads to a sample of120 parties.16 Leaving out very recent entries is unproblematic since the factorsproducing the censoring of our data are unrelated to the factors shaping ourdependent variables (Box-Steffensmeier & Jones 1997: 1416).17
Regarding the operationalisation of our dependent variables, it is impor-tant to note that only seven of the 61 parties that did not manage to assurerepeated reelection after breakthrough managed a ‘comeback’ – that is, reen-tered national parliament after having lost representation either the first orsecond reelection after breakthrough. To get reelected is most challenging in
early periods of party development and early failure has long-lasting conse-quences. Once a support base is consolidated later on, a party is likely toemulate successful strategies to mobilise support that worked in the past, whilesupport of core voters at later stages of a party’s history is likely to have beenroutinised. In other words – everything being equal – the quicker after break-through a party loses representation, the heavier the impact of electoral failureon the working of the organisation that had only a little time to consolidatesupport. Consequently, assessing party performance at the initial electionsafter parliamentary breakthrough provides a meaningful picture of new partyperformance more generally.18
Classifying formation types
To capture the distinction between entrepreneurial and rooted new partiesoperationally, each party in our dataset was coded regarding whether or not itsfoundation was supported by one or several identifiable promoter organisa-tions or groups. Relevant groups were identified along criteria derived fromthe literature on voluntary associations (Knoke 1988: 312;Van Deth 1997: 2–3)and organised interests (Pross 1992: 102–111; Halpin & Jordan 2012: 12). Newformations qualified as rooted when their foundation was supported by asocietal group that predated the actual formation19 and at that time had inplace at least a rudimentary organisational infrastructure,20 including volun-tary members or affiliates contributing to the organisation’s maintenance.21
These organisations had to be directed towards some collective, societal needor interest, without seeking election themselves22 – that is, their raison d’êtreneeded to be defined by extra-parliamentary activities (to function as a sepa-rate support base). While new parties might doubtlessly profit from other,more fluid sources of support (e.g., generated by personality-oriented loyaltyto local notables), we chose a more narrow operationalisation to capture typesof group support that are likely to be associated with the resources, skills andmember orientations conducive to institutionalisation as specified earlier.
As a minimum threshold, we considered a linkage between such a group(once identified) and the new formation as sufficient when sources indicatedthe expressed support of the former for the new party’s formation, suggestingan informal transfer of loyalty and resources from group to party.23 To requireformalised ties between groups and parties24 would have been too restrictivesince ties between organised interests and new parties tend to be weaker thanthe types of linkages traditionally forged by established parties (Poguntke2006: 397, 401). We coded each party that qualified as ‘organisationally new’according to these criteria independent of other formative circumstances.Minor splinter parties, for instance, were only coded as rooted when we found
ORIGINS OF PARTY FORMATION AND NEW PARTY SUCCESS 781
indications of a support base separate from the mother party, otherwise theywere coded as entrepreneurs, to avoid conflating external support withresources brought in from the mother party as far as possible.25 Parties wereclassified along these criteria on the basis of the case study literature, newspa-per reports and party publications26 (for the distribution of our dependentvariables by country see Appendix Table 1, and by type of formation AppendixTable 3).
Specifying control variables
To examine whether our distinction between the two formation types has areliable impact on new party performance, we introduced the following controlvariables into the analysis which, following the existing literature, can beexpected to affect new party performance. First, to capture a party’s individualshort-term success in relation to the institutional entry barriers it needs to copewith to assure reelection, we include the variable breakthrough success. Itcaptures the share of the national vote that a new party has won at its break-through election minus the minimum vote share necessary for parliamentaryentry. The latter (i.e., the national threshold of inclusion for each country) ismeasured following the logic laid out in Taagepera (2002) capturing theminimum percentage of the national vote necessary to win one seat under themost favourable circumstances. Logically, the initial level of success shouldaffect reelect1 particularly strongly.
Second, we control for the permissiveness of the electoral system. An elec-torally weak new party is more likely to have a chance to gain reelection if theentry barrier is low. We use party system fragmentation on the parliamentarylevel as a proxy measured as the effective number of parties in parliament (seeon this, Lijphart 1994: 68, 109).This measure has the virtue to capture variationin the impact of similar electoral systems as well as variation in the impactwithin the same system resulting from changes in the electoral system, both ofwhich alter the level of permissiveness. We measure fragmentation at eachparty’s breakthrough election using the database provided in Gallagher andMitchell (2009).27
Third, we considered the nature of a new party’s profile. A new entry thatpresents a genuinely new profile makes it harder for mainstream parties tocredibly take over its core issues and win voters back and is, thus, more likelyto sustain support (Meguid 2008). To capture newcomers’ ideological distinc-tiveness, we introduce a dummy variable based on Abedi’s authoritative clas-sification of ‘challenger’ parties – parties that challenge the status quo in termsof major policy and political system issues (Abedi 2004: 11–14). We consist-ently followed his classification to identify those new parties that qualified as
distinct. Exceptions were only made when parties had been classified as chal-lengers that represented a variation of an ideology already occupied byanother (in some cases also new) party in the party system. This was appro-priate since, unlike Abedi, we attempted to capture distinctiveness relative tothe offer provided by competitors at the time of breakthrough (rather thanprotest character more broadly). The minority of parties in our dataset, notcovered by Abedi, were classified along the same criteria.
Fourth, we consider the access barriers that regulate parties’ access toinstitutional resources. The variables state funding access and broadcastingaccess are based on two ordinal indicators containing four scores each, asconstructed by Bischoff (2006) (see Appendix Table 2 for details). The higherthe institutional barrier to access these resources for minor parties (e.g.,depending on the vote share necessary to be eligible), the less likely we expectnew parties to assure reelection after breakthrough. Each variable has beencoded on party level and captures the nature of the regime in place from anindividual party’s breakthrough onwards.
Fifth, we introduced a dummy variable, strength regional tier, distinguishingconstitutionally federalised systems and devolved systems (with directlyelected, powerful regional parliaments, coded 1) from those unitary systemswithout such institutions (coded 0). New parties operating in the former typeof system, that had the chance to get established regionally before entering thenational arena, are likely to perform better once reaching the national levelsince they are more likely to have a loyal support base, more experience incampaigning and are likely to perform more convincingly in public office oncethey enter national parliament.28
Finally, we introduced a variable on government participation and coded aparty 1 if it joined national government (as formal partner or as support party)right after breakthrough and 0 if it did not, since previous research argues thatgovernment participation can constitute a shock if new parties that are organi-sationally still vulnerable take on this responsibility too early (e.g., Deschou-wer 2008). The variable should affect new party performance negatively.
Methods and findings
Our data includes parties nested within countries. Accordingly, we need amodelling strategy that considers that our units of analysis are not independ-ent from each other and that enables us to model effects on the party as wellas on the system level. Especially, to model effects of system level variablesadequately, multilevel models are mandatory (Steenbergen & Jones 2002).We,therefore, estimate logistic random-effect multilevel regression models to
ORIGINS OF PARTY FORMATION AND NEW PARTY SUCCESS 783
explain new party performance after breakthrough with reelect1 and reelect2as dependent variables. This further allows us to disentangle the various vari-ables’ effects on short-term performance (reelect1) as compared to sustainabil-ity (reelect2) of new parties. To ease coefficient comparison, we transform toscales with a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 1 those independent variablesthat are not dichotomous before integrating them into to the statistical models.Descriptive information on all variables can be found in the appendices.
With a sample of 120 parties in 17 countries, we are aware that our modelsmight suffer from over-fitting if too many variables are included. Simultane-ously, we face the widespread trade-off of losing relevant controls when delib-erately leaving out independent variables to improve model fit.We address thisissue by estimating bivariate logistic random-effect multilevel regressionmodels for each independent variable and the full models including all vari-ables. We include those independent variables in the analysis that show asignificant effect in either the bivariate or in one or both of the full models.Thereby we minimise the danger of missing important influences on our twodependent variables. It further provides a sound foundation to exclude twovariables: state funding access and government participation which do not havea significant impact on reelect1 or reelect2, neither in the bivariate nor the fullmodels. Leaving them out increases the model fit of our final models (i.e., theBIC falls from 155.02 to 151.86 for reelect1 and from 157.56 to 151.77 forreelect2, respectively, compared to the full models), while we minimise the riskof over-fitting the models.29 Table 1 reports the results of the two final models.
Table 1 shows that most variables either influence reelect1 or reelect2, sub-stantiating our theoretical arguments that factors driving a party’s initial per-formance do not necessarily shape sustainability later on. Only the distinctionbetween the two formation types (entrepreneur) affects both dependent vari-ables. Entrepreneurs are not only less likely to prevent the immediate declineof initial support, they are also less likely to maintain a support base in thelonger term. Moving on to the factors that only affect reelect1, a party’s break-through success (percentage of national vote in relation to the institutionalthreshold of inclusion) and the strength of the regional tier have significanteffects in the expected direction. Both variables help to prevent a party’simmediate failure after breakthrough.The better a party performs at its break-through election, the higher the probability is that it is able to secure reelec-tion. Similarly, the probability for reelection is higher for new parties operatingin systems with a strong regional tier.
Similarly, ideological distinctiveness, electoral system permissiveness andbroadcasting access have only a significant effect on one of the two dependentvariables, but influence reelect2 instead. Ideological distinctiveness helpsparties to sustain support rather than preventing immediate failure after
breakthrough, which is in line with recent work on niche parties that stressesthe importance of maintaining a distinct profile for new parties to defend theirniche in the longer term (e.g., Meguid 2008; Spoon 2009). Similarly, the morepermissive an electoral system is, the higher the chance of a new party tosustain support. Since the support of vulnerable new parties is likely to gradu-ally decrease, parties might still maintain sufficient support to regain parlia-mentary access once, irrespective of the electoral system. At the election afterthat, though, when support has declined further, the permissiveness of theelectoral system becomes a decisive factor. Finally, we find a negative effect ofbroadcasting access on reelect2 – that is, the higher the barriers to gain accessto this resource, the less likely a party will sustain sufficient support to stayrepresented. New parties tend to receive considerable media attention whenthey win seats on the national level for the first time. This attention is likely tobe short-lived and likely to decline once a party enters parliament repeatedly.Then, a minor party starts to struggle for public attention and access to freebroadcasting starts to affect its capacity to maintain support.
To assess the real-world meaning of our findings, the following tables reportthe predicted probabilities of reelect1 (Table 2) and reelect2 (Table 3) at
Table 1. Results of random-effect multilevel models
Notes: Coefficients of logistic random-effect multilevel models, standard errors in brackets,levels of significance: *** p < 0.01; ** p < 0.05; * p < 0.10. State funding access and govern-ment participation (in brackets) were excluded from the model based on findings from thebivariate and the full models.
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different values of all significant explanatory variables. Starting with variablesshaping only reelect1, Table 2 indicates that an outstanding performance interms of vote shares at the breakthrough election (breakthrough success)makes it nearly certain that a party is able to secure reelection, whereas partieswith an initial vote share that only slightly exceeds the threshold of inclusion
Table 2. Predicted probabilities of Reelect1
Variable ScorePredicted
probabilityConfidence
interval
Entrepreneur 0 0.89 0.80–0.97
1 0.53 0.38–0.69
Breakthrough success 0 (minimum) 0.64 0.50–0.79
7.5 0.83 0.72–0.95
15 0.93 0.82–1.04
22.5 0.97 0.90–1.04
29.5 (maximum) 0.99 0.95–1.03
Strength regional tier 0 0.65 0.51–0.79
1 0.87 0.77–0.98
Table 3. Predicted probabilities of Reelect2
Variable ScorePredicted
probabilityConfidence
interval
Entrepreneur 0 0.74 0.59–0.90
1 0.19 0.05–0.34
Ideological distinctiveness 0 0.38 0.18–0.57
1 0.64 0.41–0.86
Electoral system permissiveness 1.74 (minimum) 0.27 0.03–0.51
face only a 64 per cent chance of gaining reelection. The chance to gainreelection in a political system without a strong regional tier is 65 per cent, butrises to a remarkable 87 per cent in systems with a strong regional tier. Lookingat factors shaping reelect2 other than formation type, parties with a distinctpolicy profile (ideological distinctiveness) have a 64 per cent chance ofrepeated reelection while parties which emulate mainstream ideologies haveonly a 38 per cent chance of sustaining support. Moreover, in constrainingelectoral systems new parties face a remarkably lower chance to gain repeatedreelection (e.g., about 30 per cent in systems with very low fragmentation, likeNew Zealand at the beginning of the 1990s) than in permissive systems (e.g.,more than 80 per cent in systems with very high fragmentation, like Belgium atthe beginning of the 1990s). Also, the range of broadcasting access granted toparties influences the chance for new parties of gaining repeated reelection:Whereas in systems with no free broadcasting access for all parties (4) thechance to get reelected twice is quite low (23 per cent), it is remarkably high(77 per cent) in systems with free broadcasting access for all parties (1).
Most importantly, entrepreneur is not only the only variable that has sig-nificant effects in both models – it also makes the biggest difference: Whereasentrepreneurs have a about fifty-fifty chance of avoiding immediate failure(reelect1), for rooted parties it is 89 per cent. Moving to sustainability (relect2),it increases from 19 per cent for entrepreneurial to 74 per cent for rootedparties. Figure 1 visualises the effects of our main explanatory variable bycontrasting the predicted probabilities of reelect1 (on the right) with those ofreelect2 (on the left) according to the different values of the variable. That theeffect of entrepreneur is steeper on reelect2 than on reelect1 substantiatesMudde’s (2007) expectation that structural factors are more relevant for aparty’s sustainability than for its short-term performance.
Conclusions and outlook
This article assessed how the nature of party formation – being an entrepre-neur rather than a rooted newcomer – affects new parties’ performance pat-terns after their national breakthrough. Unlike earlier cross-national studieson new party emergence that focus on the number of entries at nationalelections, we deliberately chose the individual party as our unit of analysis andits performance after parliamentary breakthrough – a particularly vulnerablephase in a newcomer’s career. We further theorised that the capacity toprevent immediate failure after breakthrough and the capacity to sustainsupport and assure repeated reelection are qualitatively different challengesand are, therefore, likely to be affected by different factors.
ORIGINS OF PARTY FORMATION AND NEW PARTY SUCCESS 787
We empirically examined our claims on the basis of a newly compileddataset of organisationally new parties that entered their national parliamentsin 17 advanced democracies over the last four decades. Applying multilevelanalyses, we indeed found that different variables affect the capacity of newparties to prevent immediate failure (reelect1) and to sustain support (ree-lect2), respectively. Only the type of party formation affected both stages andfurthermore had the strongest effect. New formations that cannot rely on tiesto already organised, societal groups – so-called ‘entrepreneurs’ – are muchless likely to maintain a national presence in the short and medium terms thanrooted new parties.
The importance of this factor for party evolution is much stressed in theo-retical work and qualitative comparative research. Yet while Panebianco(1988), due to his focus on long-established parties, considers the emancipationof parties from societal groups or promoter organisations as part of a success-ful institutionalisation process, the literature on (less consolidated) parties innew democracies teaches us that group ties can help still fluid party organisa-tions to stabilise (Randall & Svåsand 2002). Our findings show that the latterinsight is important for the study of new party sustainability in advanceddemocracies as well. To be clear, our findings do not question the importance
0.2
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Figure 1. The effect of formation type (entrepreneur) on Reelect1 and Reelect2.
of other factors prominent in the literature (e.g., ideological distinctiveness ofnew parties or the permissiveness of the electoral system). Instead, theysuggest the systematic consideration of the nature of party formation to assurethe robustness of existing findings in future studies, be these studies interestedin new parties’ electoral participation, their parliamentary entry or their long-term performance. On a theoretical level, our theoretical approach and thefindings it helped to generate stress the need to carefully consider the impli-cations of the type of party performance we are interested in, particularly thetime horizon associated with it, which shapes the nature of the theoreticalapproach suitable for its study.
While our analyses allows for the conclusion that lacking societal roots – tooriginate as an entrepreneur – makes it more difficult for a parliamentarynewcomer to sustain support after breakthrough, thereby highlighting theimportance of formation type, we cannot conclude from our findings howformative conditions affect institutionalisation which, in turn, facilitates thesustainability of support, as theorised above. To specify directly the mecha-nisms at work that link party origin and party institutionalisation, we need toengage in in-depth analyses of systematically selected case studies that are ableto bring the choices of party elites into the picture – elites who might decide infavour of, or against, investing in the formation of an institutionalised partyorganisation, reinforcing, or in the opposite counteracting, formative condi-tions (De Lange & Art 2011; Bolleyer 2013). While the specific societalfoundations of new parties might make elite choices conducive to institution-alisation more or less likely, as suggested in the theoretical part, it does notfollow that the leadership of entrepreneurial formations, by default, refuse toor are unable to build a lasting organisation (e.g., Harmel &Svåsand 1993;Mudde 2007; Art 2011; Bolleyer et al. 2012). While this article offers a firstcross-national account of an important part of the story of why some newentries might consolidate, while others decline, to develop an encompassingunderstanding of new party success and failure, we need to address a furtherchallenge: we need to link ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, both theoretically andempirically (Kitschelt 1989; Ware 2009).
Acknowledgements
The main data collection was conducted during a Marie Curie Fellowship heldby Nicole Bolleyer at Leiden University (IEF project number 236894). Thecompletion of the research was facilitated by the Economic and SocialResearch Council (RES-239-25-0032) and the Alexander van Humboldt Foun-dation. Many thanks go to Susan Banducci, Stefanie Beyens, Carina Bischoff,
ORIGINS OF PARTY FORMATION AND NEW PARTY SUCCESS 789
Tanja A. Börzel, Kris Deschouwer, Liesbet Hooghe,André Kaiser, Paul Lucar-die, Magdalena Staniek, Gary Marks, Caitlin Milazzo, Daniel Stegmüller andGeorgios Xezonakis for their feedback and advice. Early versions of the articlewere presented at a Jour Fixe of the Kolleg-Forschergruppe ‘The Transforma-tive Power of Europe’, Free University of Berlin, November 2010, and in theworkshop ‘Patterns of Party Persistence, Decline and Disintegration’ at theECPR Joint Sessions, St Gallen,April 2011. Many thanks go to the participantsof both events as well as to the five EJPR referees and the editors of thejournal for their helpful suggestions for improving the article. All remainingmistakes are solely ours.
Appendix Table 1. Performance patterns of new partiesafter breakthrough
Electoral system permissiveness 4.21 1.56 1.74 8.41
Funding access* 2.81 0.83 1 4
Broadcasting access** 2.62 1.08 1 4
Government participation 10.00 0.30 0 1
Notes: Information on the variable strength regional tier can be found in Note 29. * Thisvariable ranges from a barrier of less than 1 per cent of the vote is required to receive funding(1) to no funding provision at all (4) (Bischoff 2006).** This variable ranges from provision offree television time to all parties (1) to no free television time at all (4) (Bischoff 2006).
Appendix Table 3. Joint distribution of dependent and mainexplanatory variables
1. Recognising the importance of the rise of new parties in advanced democracies, we finda wide range of insightful cross-national studies focusing either on the evolution ofparticular party families (e.g., Kitschelt 1989; Poguntke 2002; Ignazi 2003; Carter 2005;Mudde 2007; Spoon 2009; Art 2011; for a study systematically covering several partyfamilies, see Meguid 2008) or on cross-national patterns of new party emergence andentry (e.g., Mair 1999; Hug 2001; Abedi 2004; Tavits 2006).
2. See on the methodological implications, Geddes (1990).3. Prominent examples are the Dutch Pim Fortuyn List and New Democracy (Sweden).4. Examples are the French Greens (Les Verts) or the Swiss Federal Democratic Union
(Eidgenössische Demokratische Union).5. Different from Krouwel’s and Lucardie’s (2008) definition, our conception suggests that
entrepreneurs can be outsiders to politics or professional politicians who leave theirparty to found a new one.
6. See on conceptions of newness, Barnea and Rahat (2011).7. Following this criterion for exclusion, we considered Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang)
as the successor party of the Vlaams Blok (itself a new party according to our definition)
ORIGINS OF PARTY FORMATION AND NEW PARTY SUCCESS 791
– that is, they were counted as only one party. Similarly, the New Flemish Alliance(NVA) was the major faction of the Volksunie (an older party from which also theVlaams Blok originated as a smaller splinter). Since the NVA took the organisationalresources of the mother party (e.g., personnel, real estate) with it (Govaert 2002: 32), weconsidered the NVA as the successor party of the Volksunie and excluded it.
8. The Dutch Christian Democratic Appeal is one example of this configuration and wastherefore excluded.
9. An example of this constellation is the Irish Labour Party that was joined by theremainders of the Democratic Left (new party), which therefore was excluded.
10. Only nine new formations that involved established parties qualified as organisationallynew.
11. The national threshold is operationalised through a party’s entry into the first house ofparliament. An exception is made with regard to Australia, where entry into the Senateis considered as similarly important for a new party as entry into the House of Repre-sentatives. The Australian Senate has a more proportional electoral system than the oneof the House of Representatives. It is therefore difficult to argue that this second houseis inferior in terms of democratic legitimacy and therefore less relevant (from theviewpoint of other parties or citizens) as an ‘access point’ into national politics than theHouse of Representatives (which can be argued with regard to other second houses thathave incongruent and symmetrical powers in federal systems included in this study).The1975 constitutional crisis is indicative: a government with majority support in the Houseof Representatives had to step down, being blocked by a partisan opposition that had amajority in the Senate – an incident unheard of in other federal settings.
12. Consequently, the oldest, organisationally new formations in our dataset were formed in1968 and, at the earliest, entered national parliament in the same year, as was the case forthe Belgian Walloon Rally.
13. The criterion for persistence (or survival) would be the nomination of candidates forelections. If a party, even still existing as an organisation on the ground, ceases to engagein that core activity, it does not qualify as a party but functions as pressure group. See onthis, Sartori (1976).
14. We deliberately look at party systems characterised by ‘competition between unequals’(Meguid 2008) – that is, where new parties face a majority of old parties as main rivals.This is why Italy (although being a long-lived democracy) was excluded, having under-gone a renewal of its party system in the 1990s.
15. Spain, Greece and Portugal (that only democratised in the 1970s) are excluded (as morerecently democratised systems). Having chosen a cut-off point in the late 1960s fordistinguishing new from old parties, this assured a coherent application of this coredistinction across countries.
16. To identify the relevant sample of parties and to compile electoral data for the analysisaccordingly, we started out with cross-national datasets (www.parties-and-elections.de,the EJPR data yearbook, and the Caramani (2000) dataset on elections in WesternEurope) and identified all organisationally new parliamentary entries covered. We thenidentified the parties that were summed up in the ‘others category’ (and had remainedunidentified) for all elections from 1968 onwards, using official election statisticsor more detailed country-specific databases (e.g., www.ibzdgip.fgov.be/result/nl/search.php?type=year; http://elections.uwa.edu.au; www.anneepolitique.ch/de/aps-online.php;www.electionresults.govt.nz). We then identified, in a third step, which of those quali-fied as organisationally new. A significant minority of our cases turned out to be so
small in terms of voter support and/or so short-lived that they tended to ‘vanish’ in the‘others category’. Thus, not to identify them would have led to a systematic exclusionof weakly performing new parties which could have implied selection bias (Geddes1990).
17. When splitting our sample into two time periods before and after 1989, the influence ofparty origin on our dependent variables remains unchanged.
18. See for more detailed analyses of new parties’ long-term trajectories in the 17 democ-racies covered in this article, Bolleyer (2013).
19. Leaders of newly formed parties might deliberately build linkages to societal groups andorganisations after being formed to access resources important for organisation building.While this might lead to the same outcome as ‘being rooted’ from the start, this wouldnot correspond to the phenomenon we try to capture.
20. Consequently, being formed as the vehicle of temporary, local protest is insufficient toqualify as rooted (e.g., Future for Finnmark).
21. This is necessary for a promoter organisation to provide a potential pool of supportersfrom which a party might be able to recruit, as suggested earlier.
22. Consequently, a party that is formed by recently formed local parties (that themselveshave no identifiable ties to societal organisations) was coded as entrepreneur (e.g.,Liveable Netherlands).
23. In most instances, the case study literature pointed out that the party profited from suchlinkages in terms of the ability to recruit loyal and skilled members and personnel. If aparty solely declared itself to be the ‘voice’ of particular groups, this was insufficient.
24. Examples of formalised ties would be collective membership of the group in the party(Allern & Bale 2011: 13).
25. The Finnish Ecological Party Greens (a splinter of the Green Alliance), for instance,qualified as rooted since it represented a separate strand of the environmental move-ment fighting for a different range of issues than the strand that supported its motherparty. The Danish People’s Party that profited from resources coming from its motherparty was coded as entrepreneur.
26. The list of the 120 new parties included in our analysis and their respective coding areavailable from the lead author upon request.
27. The data is available at: www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/staff/michael_gallagher/ElSystems/Docts/ElectionIndices.pdf
28. Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland and the UnitedKingdom were coded as countries with strong regional tiers (1); Denmark, Finland,Iceland, Ireland, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden werecoded as countries without strong regional tiers (0).
29. In addition, we performed collinearity checks. We only found a non-trivial relationshipbetween strength of regional tier and broadcasting access (with a Cramer’s V of 0.53).Since this relationship is only of medium strength, we do not consider it as problematicfor our models.We also performed robustness checks by running 17 regressions for eachof the two dependent variables, while skipping one country in each regression. Mostimportantly, regarding our main predictor variable, entrepreneur, we did not find anydifferences between countries in either model. As far as the effects of our controlvariables are concerned, their overall pattern stays the same in 12 out of 17 models whenaccounting for reelect1. In the remaining models, given a reduced number of cases, theeffect of breakthrough success (only significant on a 10 per cent level in the overallmodel) just falls short of reaching conventional levels of significance. Similarly, the
ORIGINS OF PARTY FORMATION AND NEW PARTY SUCCESS 793
effects of ideological distinctiveness, electoral system permissiveness and broadcastingaccess (all only significant on a 10 per cent level in the overall model) fall short ofreaching significance in up to six out of 17 regressions accounting for reelect2. At thesame time, the coefficients of all control variables that are significant in the overallmodels remained signed in the right direction.
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Address for correspondence: Nicole Bolleyer, Department of Politics, University of Exeter,Amory Building, Office 236E, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4NS, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
