The Other Not-Quite-Populism: New Parties and Their Challenge to New and Old Democracies

There is another populism, one that is not radical right. The massive growth of new, anti-elite political parties across Europe does not ring the same alarm bells as leaders who flirt with the themes of national socialism, but the light populism of anti-corruption outsiders has its own dangers. The problems are more subtle and slower to emerge but they are intrinsic in the spread of these ostentatiously new parties. The new party challenge has begun to gain notice but the scholarship remains far behind reality on questions of how a flood of new parties can affect democracy. The paper first details the rise of new parties and the subsequent emergence of a consistent and ongoing pattern of rapid cycling among new parties with concentrations of such behavior in newer democracies in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia but with an increasingly clear pattern in established democracies as well. The paper then looks closely at the consequences of these new party cycles on the overall political system. In the short run the emergence of new parties may bring corruption issues into public debate, increase turnout and oust leaders who abuse the system, but in the long run without specific steps to limit their own susceptibility to corruption, they do more harm than good, ultimately alienating voters and reinforcing short-term time horizons: attempting to maximize votes to avoid becoming a "one-term wonder" and attempts to maximize clientelist resource extraction in case when survival seems unlikely.