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The past forty years has seen a notable increase in the number of issues on the political agenda of established democracies. These new considerations enter the political marketplace through new parties that focus on specialized issues, such as the environment, immigration, or regional autonomy. The success of these parties has been attributed to how existing mainstream parties engage with these new issues. Yet across the developed world, these parties continue to make electoral and government inroads. Instead of attributing these niche party's success to their unique agendas, the inability of competitors to successfully engage with their issues, or socio-economic reasons, this dissertation explores these parties as the mainstays of political competition that they have become. In effect, this amounts to examining how these newer parties engage with existing mainstream issues.Analyses are performed on the macro and micro level that examine whether voters reward niche parties for their engagement in mainstream issues. Cross-nationally, as nationalist parties engage with a broader set of issues, they are rewarded at the polls. Case studies of Italy and Finland are used to examine if voters for nationalist parties do indeed attribute to them competence in economic areas. When the Italian Lega Nord offered a platform similar to its mainstream competitors, voters did not distinguish it from its mainstream rivals on economic stewardship. Similarly, evidence from Finnish post-election surveys indicates that voters who were highly concerned about economic issues supported the nationalist True Finns both in election and government participation. Such findings suggest that understandings of how parties compete on multiple dimensions are ready for an update.

The turnover of political parties is a key mechanism of renewal of electoral choices. We present an organizational ecological theory on party system change, predicting that party system saturation (i.e., the effective number of parties compared to the party system's carrying capacity) differently affects the entry and exit of niche and mainstream parties from lower house elections. Pooled times-series analyses on 352 elections, 509 parties, and 21 established democracies demonstrate that party system saturation indeed increases the likelihood of exit of mainstream parties but not of niche parties. Strikingly, we also find that party system saturation increases the entry of mainstream parties. Hence, an important paradox arises since oversaturation negatively affects their survival chances.

This article investigates how the degree of electoral competition affects parties’ policy positions. It follows a growing body of research on party positioning in multiparty competition that regards elections as signals for parties that have to choose their positions and issue strategies. In this article we argue that previous elections provide information about the competitiveness of the upcoming election. The expected degree of electoral competition affects parties’ future policy positions since with increasing competitiveness of an election, parties have higher incentives to move toward a vote-maximizing position. However, what constitutes a vote-maximizing strategy varies between parties. While large mainstream parties have an incentive to moderate their positions, small and niche parties choose more extreme positions to distinguish themselves from their mainstream competitors. Applying a novel measure of electoral competitiveness, we find that the degree of electoral competition indeed determines par...

This chapter explains the relationship between the four European worlds of welfare democracies (Nordic, continental, southern, and Anglo-Saxon) and multidimensional party competition. It systematically examines the variation of the relationship between party positions and salience on economic and cultural politics. The expectation is that southern political economies facilitate closer association between economic and cultural issues, whereas Nordic welfare states produce party systems where competition between mainstream parties is defined by economic politics. The continental political economies stand between the two extremes. The argument is tested with the most recent (2014) waves of data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the European Elections Studies. The analysis suggests different political opportunity structures, and consequently different behavior of radical challenger parties of western Europe. Here, the diverse political economies again correlate with the flavors of radicalism.

The emergence of the information society has resulted in an unprecedented debate on issues such as internet censorship and surveillance, privacy, and copyright. Such issues have been mobilized through the channels of party politics by pirate parties, which represent an almost ideal-typical manifestation of the niche party phenomenon. This paper provides the first comparative analysis of the impact of contextual factors on the cross-national variations in the levels of pirate voting by focussing on the 11 countries in which pirate parties contested EP elections between 2009 and 2014. The analysis is performed using QCA, and suggests that the interplay between five contextual factors play an important role in influencing the different levels of pirate voting across Europe: the saliency of macro-economic issues; the levels of trust in political parties; the levels of trust in the internet; the turnout of voters aged 18–24 and the de-alignment of the young voters aged 18–24. On the one hand, the analysis reveals that the failed electoral mobilization of young voters, as reflected in the low levels of turnout of young adults, plays a prominent role in explaining why the majority of pirate parties are electorally unsuccessful. On the other hand, however, the analysis of the most favourable breeding grounds for significant levels of pirate voting to take place suggests that such an outcome is usually not dependent on the levels of turnout of young voters, but is rather influenced by a more complex interaction between the other contextual factors under investigation.

This article explores the subject matter of new political parties’ survival by analysing the recent trajectory of the Green party ORaH in Croatia. ORaH emerged in October 2013; it won 9.4 percent of the vote at the 2014 European Parliament election and subsequently rose to 18.5 percent of public support in October 2014, only to collapse to 1.7 percent of the vote at the parliamentary election held in November 2015. In order to explain ORaH’s initial meteoric rise and its later equally rapid demise, we will employ studies on new and niche parties while we further elaborate our analysis of ORaH’s programme by profiling ORaH’s voter base. We also address a recurrent weakness in political party research by analysing the role of the European level of competition in increasing the chances of a new party’s survival by developing a framework that better integrates domestic and international dynamics of political party development. Our main finding is that despite its success in the 2014 European Parliament elections, and even though its electorate shares important features of the European Green voter, ORaH failed to secure parliamentary representation because of the inability of the party’s leadership to steer the party away from its initial contender status and define OraH’s policy niche.

The paper examines determinants of electoral entry and success of ethnic minority parties in central and eastern Europe. The application of a hierarchical selection model shows that the strategic entry of minority parties depends on their expected electoral success due both to observed and unobserved factors. Drawing on formal models of electoral entry, the electoral success of new (or niche) parties is expected to be influenced by the costs of entry (determined by electoral thresholds) and the potential for electoral support. The latter depends on the reactions of political competitors and electoral demand, measured here as the size of ethnic groups and the saliency of ethnic issues. In line with these expectations, parties only run if they can expect electoral support sufficient to pass the electoral threshold. This finding would have been overlooked by a naive model of electoral success which does not take self-selection into account.

The concept of the niche party has become increasingly popular in analyses of party competition. Yet, existing approaches vary in their definitions and their measurement approaches. We propose using a minimal definition that allows us to compare political parties in terms of their ‘nicheness’. We argue that the conceptual core of the niche party concept is based on issue emphasis and that a niche party emphasizes policy areas neglected by its rivals. Based on this definition, we propose a continuous measure that allows for more fine-grained measurement of a party’s ‘nicheness’ than the dominant, dichotomous approaches and thereby limits the risk of measurement error. Drawing on data collected by the Comparative Manifesto Project, we show that (1) our measure has high face validity and (2) exposes differences among parties that are not captured by alternative, static or dichotomous measures.