Contextual Impact on New Party Entrance

• Although much of the first half of the 20th century was affected by major events such as war and dictatorship, theparty systems of the Western Europe stayed quite static. In the words of Lipset and Rokkan, the party systems hadfrozen and were still in the middle of the 1960s a reflection of the cleavage structures which dominated the firstdecades of the century. Somewhat ironically, just years after their study was published, an explosion of new partiesentering national parliaments took place more or less all over Western Europe. This enlightens the need forunderstanding why and when new parties enter national parliaments for the first time.This study shows that the cross-national variation between the West European countries are significant and thatall three Scandinavian countries can be labelled as low-scorers when it comes to number new parties in their nationalparliaments. The survey also shows that more new parties have entered during the latter part of the 20th century thanduring the 1960s and 1970s.Three different types of factors, institutional, societal and economic, are tested to explain the cross-countryvariations. Overall the analysis gives weak results. Some institutions and economic indicators seem to explain at leastsome of the variance. But most of these factors, for instance electoral system, and the societal conditions seem to beof little importance. The main conclusion drawn from this is the difficulty of explaining new party entrance with theuse of system-level analysis. In-depth case studies can perhaps be a more appropriate way to get an understanding ofwhen new parties enter national parliaments.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

new parties

Western Europe

parliamentary entrance

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