New and Old Democracies: Party System Nationalization and the Role of Party Discipline in Europe

Recent literature suggests that parties in newer democracies are different than parties in older democracies (Mainwaring 1999; Webb and White 2007; Bochsler 2010) in terms of party identification, electoral volatility and clientelism. Surprisingly, little work has been done exploring differences in the territorial structure of parties between old and new democracies. This paper uses an original dataset measuring the degree of party system nationalization for a large sample of old and new European democracies (169 national elections in 33 countries between 1970 and 2008) to explore the relationship between the age of parties in a democracy and the degree of party system nationalization. I show that European countries with old and consolidated parties tend to be nationalized, whereas countries with young parties show significant variation in the territorial nature of their parties and party systems. I argue that the variation among countries with young parties is explained by differences in party discipline. Weakly disciplined parties are more likely to become nationalized because less discipline gives them the flexibility to spread across the territory. In contrast, highly disciplined parties are less likely to be nationalized. Interestingly, this effect of party discipline disappears in countries with older parties.