Two Faces of Party System Stability: Organizational Continuity and Programmatic Consistency

The scholarly literature considers party system stability a necessary condition of electoral accountability. In case the menu of choices changes from one election to another, voters are not able to reward or punish parties in government. However, stability – often reduced to organizational continuity – is not sufficient to ensure accountability. Programmatic consistency seems as important since parties radically shift their appeal over time. Thus, this paper argues we need to systematically distinguish between the stability of parties as organizations and the stability of the programmatic structure of party competition.
The highly institutionalized party systems in Western Europe characterized by historic cleavages and high rates of party survival hide this distinction, and have led scholars to conceptualize stability as a unidimensional concept. Therefore, the paper contrasts Western European party systems with party systems in Eastern Europe to provide examples to four possible combinations of stability: stable systems, unstable systems, systems with ephemeral parties, and systems with empty party labels.
The paper relies on a novel dataset of issue positions and salience collected by the POLCON ERC project. The dataset covers party competition as reported by two national newspapers during a two-months-long window of observation in 51 electoral campaigns of 12 European countries. The dataset relies on core sentence coding and provides a map of the over-time evolution of national political spaces.