Emanuele, V; Sikk, A; (2020) Party crashers? Modeling genuinely new party development paths in Western Europe. Party Politics 10.1177/1354068820911355.

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Abstract

Western Europe has recently experienced the emergence of successful new parties, but while single parties or countries have been extensively studied, insufficient attention has been devoted to this phenomenon from a comparative and long-term perspective. By relying on an original dataset covering 20 countries and 344 parliamentary elections, this paper presents the first analysis of West European ‘genuinely new parties’ across time, countries, and party families. We hypothesize that the parties differ not only in terms of their short and long-term success but have a range of distinct life paths. Through a latent growth model, we provide a classification of genuinely new parties in terms of their breakthrough and subsequent performance. According to the specific trajectory followed by new parties in the first elections they contest, the model suggests five different classes of new parties in Western Europe: explosive, meteoric, contender, flat or flop. The article discusses the implications of these findings also regarding the ability of the model to produce estimates and predictions about the future electoral performances of genuinely new parties.

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