Friday, April 15, 2016
Aria B (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
Over the last decades party systems have undergone deep changes even in the long-established Western European democracies. Electoral volatility has generally increased, sometimes reaching unprecedented levels, and new parties have successfully emerged, while others have disappeared, thus causing regeneration within the party systems. Furthermore, in some countries these events seem to occur not simply as a one-off but they tend to be recurrent. Therefore, an increasing unpredictability can be detected, as regards both the election results and the patterns of interactions among parties. This process calls into question the issue of party system de-institutionalization. This topic has been widely analyzed with reference to Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe and is also receiving increasing attention nowadays in Western Europe. This paper has the purpose to tackle the issue of party system (de-)institutionalization in Western Europe, moving ahead the research on the topic in some respects. Specifically, we want to investigate which factors are associated with a strengthening of party system institutionalization and which others foster the opposite process. In order to do so, our first task is that of providing a consistent way of measuring party system (de-)institutionalization, while the second step is detecting possible explanatory factors of such process. These latter may involve different kinds of determinants of party system (de-)institutionalization, such as the cleavage structure of the polity, the state of the economy, the political and institutional arrangements and the length of democratic experience. Our analysis covers about 340 Western European elections in 19 countries since 1945.
