1. The Vote Share of New and Young Parties
- Author:
- Carlos Gervasoni, Scott Mainwaring, and Annabella España-Nájera
- Publication Date:
- 07-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Kellogg Institute for International Studies
- Abstract:
- In this paper, we analyze the remarkable differences in the electoral success of new and young parties in fifty-eight countries in the Post World War II period. We hope to make three contributions. First, we present and test a new theoretical argument about the electoral success of new parties, or conversely about the “frozenness” of party systems, in competitive political regimes. In the short to medium term, poor performance by governing parties facilitates the electoral success of new contenders. In the long term, new parties have more opportunities for garnering votes in post-1978 democracies because of the sequencing of party building and opportunities created by modern mass media, especially television. Second, we introduce the concepts of extra-system volatility (or the vote share of new parties) and the vote share of young parties. These concepts are useful complements to the established focus on total electoral volatility. Two countries with similar levels of total volatility can have very different levels of extra-system volatility, signaling divergences in voters' willingness to flee from existing parties and different levels of dissatisfaction with the existing parties. Third, we present information on volatility, extra-system volatility, the vote share of young parties, and within-system volatility in 58 countries for an extended period of time. The historic and geographic scope of the dataset is useful for an empirical mapping and for testing our theoretical arguments about the variance in the “frozenness” of party systems or, conversely, about the electoral success of new and young parties.
- Topic:
- Democratization, Politics, and Governance