Friday, July 14, 2017
JWS - Room J10 (J355) (University of Glasgow)
Why do new parties keep emerging and winning votes and seats in European Parliament (EP) elections? While the first EP elections have been largely ignored by media, politicians, and voters back in the 1980s (Reif and Schmitt 1980), the more recent manifestations of these elections made scholars rethink the ‘second order national elections’ label initially attached to them. This paper attempts to fill this void and analyzes the capacity of new parties to compete and win votes in all EP elections (1979-2009). If the main part of the paper is rather exploratory and consists mainly of mapping out the supply of new parties across several dimensions—regions, issues, and time, the second part aims to systematically investigate which factors facilitate the emergence of these new competitors across a variety of national contexts and characteristics. The main argument developed here is that new parties are more likely to emerge when the costs of entering the political competition are low, the benefits of winning votes are high, and the probability of success is high as well. The theory considers the strategic actions of both party elites and voters’ motivations and argues that the successful entrance of new parties depends on both sides of the political equation. Strategic elites, highly interested in promoting specific issues, take advantage of the opportunity structures created by the institutional arrangements on the one hand and disappointed voters on the other emerge as main explanatory factors, with distinct dynamics in old and new democracies.
