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Research demonstrates that mainstream parties often take up the issues and positions of emerging Eurosceptic and anti-immigration parties. Yet, these accommodative strategies generally do not pay off. Why do mainstream parties nevertheless accommodate these niche actors? I argue that mainstream-niche competition is governed by intra-party dynamics. The pressure exerted by niche parties alone does not suffice to drive internally united mainstream parties to accommodate. However, when mainstream parties face substantial intra-party divisions on the niche party’s issue, they may yield under internal pressure. I find empirical support for my theoretical claims on the issue of European integration using expert survey data on 78 mainstream parties in 14 Western European democracies between 1999 and 2019. The findings contribute to our understanding of the conditions under which niche parties are contagious and illustrate how intra-party divisions can steer parties away from vote-seeking strategies with consequences for voter representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small-party persistence is a story in itself, especially when the party in question emerged as an entirely new party, lacked societal rootedness and did not boast any recognisable persons among its founding figures. The particular case is the Finnish Christian League SKL (from 2001 Christian Democrats KD), one of a family of post-Second World War fundamentalist Christian parties in the Nordic region which, over the six decades of its existence, has, unlike its Swedish and Danish counterparts, consistently surpassed the threshold of representation, but only once gained over 5 per cent of the national vote. This article asks firstly: What factors would account for SKL/KD's persistence as a small party? Secondly, why has SKL/KD remained a small party despite efforts to expand its electoral base? Was Kirchheimer correct that certain types of party simply cannot become catchall parties? Kirchheimer, it is argued, was essentially right: SKL/KD's 'nicheness' has been its greatest electoral strength but also the greatest barrier to electoral growth and significant party change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Little attention has been paid to the process of members leaving parties in order to support other parties. Party developments in the UK in the 2010s provide an opportunity to analyse the determinants of members giving up their current party and joining a rival. We examine this issue using an original panel survey of 2,679 members of the Green Party of England and Wales. Our results show that members who joined the Greens motivated by concern about social justice are more likely to leave and support Labour after Jeremy Corbyn's election as party leader. Members who joined to protect the environment are less likely to leave. Niche parties can attract members predominantly motivated by issues traditionally represented by a mainstream party but these members are more likely to leave the party again following a position change by the mainstream party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how niche parties may utilize a strategy of policy shifting to garner additional voters. It leverages a unique opportunity in which a Costa Rican political party released two different versions of its party manifesto at different moments during a single election cycle. This rare opportunity uncovers how the party shifted from having a hard conservative stance on social issues, such as abortion, to moderating its stance and centering its focus on less contentious issues in a runoff election campaign. Understanding how a single political party may alter its strategy is important because it allows us to better gauge the effectiveness of shifting policy positions, especially for niche parties, for which a particular issue area is dominant. Moreover, this analysis opens additional avenues of research on political parties in the Latin American context, since research utilizing manifesto data in this context has been limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political participation has increasingly taken unconventional forms in advanced democracies. At the same time, the traditional party systems of Europe have been upended by the recent emergence of successful niche parties. While some studies have examined partisanship and protest in tandem, the literature lacks a theoretical framework that ties niche voters to political protest. This article argues that niche voters are more likely to protest than mainstream voters, especially when the politics of governing coalitions results in niche parties being unable to represent their voters. Specifically, niche voters are more likely to protest when their party joins a coalition with a PM who is ideologically distant from the niche party's position. Using all nine waves of the European Social Survey in Western Europe, the findings broadly support this argument. These findings have important implications for understanding conditions under which people engage in political protest, especially voters of niche parties. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2022.2040237. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Internacional de Sociología is the property of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

New parties can shake up party systems by advancing new issues, influencing established competitors and affecting the dynamics of party competition. However, which kinds of new parties are successful? While the literature has extensively focused on institutional-level and election-level drivers of new party success, the literature on party-level determinants of new party success is scarce. As most studies on new party success focus on party entry at the election level or on new party survival, we argue that these studies suffer from selection bias as they do not leverage information on unsuccessful parties. This is understandable, since quality data on unsuccessful parties' vote shares, party organizations and ideological characteristics are scant. To overcome this limitation, we examine the party-level determinants of new party success in the Netherlands, including all parties that have participated in national parliamentary elections since 1946. Our findings have important implications for the study of new parties in modern democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to mainstream parties, niche parties represent a category of political parties that are said to be different in how they approach to their programme and voters. As the term 'niche' suggests, the programmes of these parties tend to be focused on issues that are either overlooked or insufficiently addressed by other political parties. The rich contemporary theoretical discussion on niche parties has noted that they focus more on defending their programme than exercising political power. This assumption, however, has not been tested on empirical data on the real activity of niche parties in the political arena. The goal of this study is to fill this gap in knowledge and verify this theoretical assumption by conducting a statistical analysis of the activities of six niche parties in selected stages of the negotiation of various bills in the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic between 1996 and 2020. The analysis large confirmed the theoretical assumption we set out to test. However, the results of our analysis also reveal that there are noticeable differences in the activity of niche parties. Entrepreneurial niche parties participate in the legislative process on average less than other niche parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral competition is determined by the issues that parties choose to compete on and the stances they adopt on these issues. However, little research has examined the trade-off between expanding a party’s programmatic stances to secondary issues while maintaining ideological continuity on primary issues. This article seeks to address this gap by examining programmatic transitions among mainstream and niche parties and in which contexts these transitions are more frequent. The study analyses 47 parties in 10 established democracies between 1986 and 2020 using multiple regression techniques. The results show that niche parties are more likely to focus on secondary issues, and when they make such transitions, they tend to be larger. The analysis also reveals that the length of niche competition influences mainstream parties’ programmatic transitions, while niche parties’ transitions are driven by their continuity in programmatic transitions and governmental experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown that mainstream political parties shift their positions on European integration in response to threats from niche parties. Whether or not this strategy affects the electoral fortunes of mainstream parties remains unclear, however. Drawing on both spatial and issue competition models of party competition, this study examines how mainstream political party accommodation of niche party position on the issue of European integration affects mainstream party electoral success. Using fixed-effects panel regression models, we investigate the effect of mainstream parties becoming more Eurosceptic in the face of a radical right political party on the size of the mainstream party's vote share. We show that position shifts towards Euroscepticism are detrimental to centre-right mainstream party success when faced with a radical right party that has seen more electoral success. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of party competition and electoral responsiveness in the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of studies have investigated when parties change their policy positions. However, this growing body of research has had limited interaction with the literature on issue competition. To bring these two perspectives together, this article investigates how and when parties adjust their respective policy positions on immigration, the environment and the welfare state. In the article it is argued that especially large parties in electoral terms adjust their policy positions on specific issues in response to changes in the party system saliency of these issues. When the other parties increase their focus on a given issue, large parties adjust their position in the direction preferred by a majority of the voters. In the article this argument is investigated empirically, based on CMP data from 18 West European countries from 1980 to 2014. The findings largely support the argument and show a strong potential for further integration of the two dominant perspectives on party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Niche parties often originate in social movements, yet the latter's role in shaping these parties has received scant attention. I argue that movement roots can help niche parties achieve both vote- and policy-seeking goals by keeping core issues salient, bolstering issue ownership and securing allies in civil society. Employing interviews with movement, as well as Green and Pirate party leaders in Sweden and Germany, I identify three mechanisms (electoral pressure, grassroots linkage, elite orientation) that lead to programmatic alignment. This article extends an emerging research agenda that highlights how social movements shape party politics and offers evidence that niche party–movement interactions open new avenues for political representation counterbalancing mainstream parties' increasing detachment from civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on role of political party organization, goals and ideology and make parties adapt to voter prefrences and aspects of parties act as mechanisms connecting median voter change to party policy change and parties focus on areas, such as immigration, and decentralization.

Copyright of Politische Vierteljahresschrift is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the differences in the representational performance of mainstream and niche parties. It hypothesizes that mainstream parties represent their voters better on the socio-economic dimension and issues, while niche parties represent their voters better on the socio-cultural dimension and specific socio-cultural issues. To test these expectations, the congruence between Dutch local representatives of both mainstream and niche parties and their voters is measured using two surveys, one among Dutch voters and one conducted by the authors among a representative sample of municipal councillors. By analysing 'many-to-many' scores of congruence, which compare the distributions of the preferences of the representatives and their voters, it is concluded that mainstream parties do not consistently represent their voters better on specific issues or dimensions than niche parties, or vice versa. Instead, a mismatch between the preferences of representatives and their voters sometimes occurs particularly on issues that a party 'owns', because representatives tend to take more radical positions on these issues than their supporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative political science has largely ignored the marked cross-national variation in Green party electoral performance. This article uses a unique aggregate dataset of 347 parliamentary elections from 32 countries over the course of 45 years to test competing theories about the causes of Green party success. The findings show that voter demand, institutions and mainstream party strategy all affect the Green vote. Green parties do well in societies with post-materialist conflicts caused by high levels of wealth or the presence of a tangible environmental dispute. The article also shows that regional decentralisation helps Green parties, but electoral systems have little effect on their vote share. Most importantly, it demonstrates that the impact of mainstream party strategy on Green electoral strength is dependent on the age of the Green party. While mainstream parties can undermine young Green parties by adopting the environmental issue, this effect is reversed once the Greens have survived a number of elections. Thus 'accommodative' mainstream party strategies eventually boost the Green vote by increasing the salience of the key Green issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown that niche parties are both increasing in importance in European party systems and behave differently than their more mainstream counterparts. Indeed, there is growing evidence that the dynamic between green parties and social democratic parties is especially nuanced. Regionalist parties differ from other niche parties in that they can be found on the left, right, and center of the ideological spectrum. We find that regionalist parties benefit from increasing the ideological distance between themselves and the mainstream party that most often wins at the national level. However, regionalist parties’ relationship with the mainstream party that most often wins in their home region is more nuanced. Regionalist parties must be distinct enough from the mainstream rival in their home region to be an alternative but close enough to serious compete for the same voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While anti-immigrant parties have been electorally successful in European parliaments, it is still unclear whether they have influenced policies. This article contributes by investigating the anti-immigrant party policy impact on a previously unexplored welfare policy area, that concerning the mobility of vulnerable European Union/European Economic Area citizens. In Sweden, the aid offered to these citizens varies a great deal in different municipalities. Furthermore, the largest anti-immigrant party (Sweden Democrats) has, unlike the mainstream political parties, preferences for a strict policy in line with so-called welfare chauvinism. Taking advantage of this subnational variation, our data give us a unique opportunity to investigate whether anti-immigrant party representation impacts welfare policy outcomes. The empirical findings show a negative correlation between Sweden Democrats' representation and the aid offered and indicates that municipalities where Sweden Democrats holds a pivotal position offer less aid to vulnerable European Union/European Economic Area citizens. The hypothesis that these effects are conditional upon the ideology of the ruling coalition is, however, not supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In every democracy, established political parties are challenged by other parties. Established parties react in various ways to other parties’ presence. A key hypothesis in the relevant literature is that established parties can decrease another party’s electoral support by parroting it, i.e. adopting its core policy issue position. This article argues, and demonstrates empirically, that this hypothesised effect mainly occurs in the event that a critical prerequisite is in place. Parroting a party decreases its support only if that party is ostracised at the same time. The article classifies a party as ostracised if its largest established competitor systematically rules out all political cooperation with it. Analysing 296 election results of 28 West European parties (1944–2011), evidence is found for a parrot effect – however, concerning ostracised parties only. On several occasions established parties have substantially decreased another party’s support by simultaneously parroting that party and ostracising it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Do leaders of 'challenger' parties adopt a 'niche' strategy in national televised debates? This article answers this question by analysing the content of the two multiparty televised leaders' debates that took place ahead of the 2015 British general election. Using computer-aided text analysis (CATA), it provides reliable and valid measures of what the leaders said in both debates and develops our theoretical understanding of how challenger-party leaders make their pitches. It finds that the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Green Party, Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru leaders all demonstrated a degree of 'nicheness' in their contributions in comparison with the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour leaders. It also finds that the challenger-party leaders placed a greater emphasis on their core concerns. Nevertheless, the debates covered much policy ground. Their structure obliged all party leaders to talk about a broad range of issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars’ attention to the concept of niche parties has greatly increased. While researchers agree that niche parties matter in a variety of ways, the definitions and measurements of such parties are manifold and an accordance remains yet to be found. I argue the given conceptualizations of niche parties (a) suffer from gaps between their measurements and theoretical concepts or (b) conceptual clarity. The theoretical concept I propose understands niche parties as (a) predominantly competing on niche market segments neglected by their competitors and (b) not discussing a broad range of these segments. By measuring exactly these two components in an additive index drawn from the MARPOR data, the validation shows that parties emphasizing niche segments differentiate themselves from their competitors also by using a condensed message on these segments. In particular, this component of party competition, the specialization of party offers, has not been studied in the literature on niche parties and should receive more attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the radical right as a strong competitor to mainstream parties has fundamentally reshaped patterns of competition in many European party systems. In this article, we systematically explore changes to the ideological landscape in Western Europe by examining whether there has been programmatic mainstreaming of radical right parties due to (a) accommodation to and (b) moderation by radical right parties. We examine positions and salience on liberal-authoritarianism and the salience of economic issues using manifesto data from 68 parties in 17 countries. Our findings provide empirical support for a rightward shift in European party systems: on liberalauthoritarianism, mainstream left and right parties have increased their emphasis and moved to the right. Yet radical right parties have generally remained niche competitors; they are increasingly extreme and more focused on liberal-authoritarianism. Our analysis has important implications for understanding party systems, party competition and citizen representation in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines niche party success in Turkey by clustering issue emphases by political parties. Lack of a comprehensive analysis on niche parties in developing world, lack of a consensus on the measurement of niche parties, and even lack of a shared definition on the issue makes the related literature vaporous. In this article, I argue that the ideological position (center vs radical) of a party is much more important than policy emphases for electoral success. Drawing on data collected by the Comparative Manifesto Project, and election outcomes in Turkey from 1961 to 2011, our study revealed that even though political parties' emphases on democracy, economy, political culture, society and justice, extreme issues such as nationalism influence niche party success to a certain degree, it is the center-party position that effects electoral outcomes primarily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Austerity policies — policies of sharp reductions of a government's budget deficint involving spending cuts and tax increases — are claimed to boost support for radical political parties. We argue, counter to popular claims, that austerity measures actually reduce support for radical and niche parties. Austerity policies force traditional left-right politics to the forefront of political debate with the traditional mainstream parties having a stronger ownership over those issues. We systematically explore the impact of austerity measures on the electoral fortunes of niche parties in 16 developed countries over a 35-year period, while controlling for a number of socio-economic variables. We find that austerity policies that rely on tax increases affect radical parties on the left and the right in different ways than fiscal adjustments based on spending cuts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an emerging consensus that niche parties are fundamentally different from mainstream parties because niche parties do not moderate their policy positions strategically. However, there is theoretical reason to believe that niche parties have an electoral incentive to shift their policy positions in the same direction as parties that are proximate to them in their most salient policy space. This paper examines whether niche parties respond to such electoral incentives, using data on government coalitions from the Parliament and Government Composition Database, and party behavior from the Comparative Manifesto Project in 17 Western style democracies. The results suggest that niche parties tend to respond strategically to the perceived behavior of proximate parties, especially on their most salient policy dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assuming that the electoral success of niche parties in EP elections is largely due to the vote switching in EP elections, this study seeks to explore the motivations leading mainstream party supporters to switch to niche parties in EP elections (niche switching voters). From the results of analyses, some important findings could be drawn. First, for niche switching voters, the ‘protest voting’ motivation is very important motive. In particular, they are strongly driven by their profound distrust in mainstream politics in switching to niche parties. Second, unlike the existing literature, European considerations matter in their voting behavior. Third, vote choice based on the niche issues also has important effect on their voting behavior. This demonstrates clearly that, niche switching voters are different from other switching voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there are numerous contributions on ethnic electoral politics, relatively little research has been devoted to explain the scope of success of ethnic minority parties. This article addresses the issue within the bounds of post-communist Europe, paying particular attention to the effect of cultural legacies. It was confirmed, first of all, that ethnic parties are likely to emerge only if their titular minority has a number of voters larger than what is necessary to obtain parliamentary representation. Otherwise, the most successful were the ethnic parties representing the minorities characterised by legacy of regional domination, that is, those whose members had once enjoyed a dominant position as a ruling nation on a given territory (e.g. Hungarians in Slovakia). The second-successful were the parties representing homeland minorities, that is, those which have resided on a given area for more than two centuries, but have never been members of a ruling nation. The parties representing diaspora or immigrant minorities were the least successful. Further research could assess the importance of these factors in other regions of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies document that voters infer parties' left-right policy agreement based on governing coalition arrangements. This article extends this research to present theoretical and empirical evidence that European citizens update their perceptions of junior coalition partners' left-right policies to reflect the policies of the prime minister's party, but that citizens do not reciprocally project junior coalition partners' policies onto the prime minister's party. These findings illuminate the simple rules that citizens employ to infer parties' policy positions, broaden understanding of how citizens perceive coalition governance and imply that 'niche' parties, whose electoral appeal depends upon maintaining a distinctive policy profile, assume electoral risks when they enter government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The role of members of political parties is ambiguous because it entails both benefits and costs. In order to shed light on the question of whether members are an asset or a liability for parties, I examine whether parties use their ideology on a left–right dimension as a collective incentive for the appeal to actual and potential party members. A quantitative analysis of the effects of changes in membership on partisan ideological change, covering 61 parties in 11 Western democracies from the 1950s to the early 1990s, shows that there is a weak, but statistically significant, effect. An additional analysis of two mechanisms by which membership has an effect refutes the alternative explanation that positional changes of the median member account for partisan ideological change. In total, the results indicate that members are both an asset and a liability and that parties try to keep the two in balance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that niche party formation is only one of several substitutable strategies for niche activists seeking policy influence. Other organizational mechanisms are argued to be superior to political parties under certain institutional conditions. I introduce a formal model of how activists achieve policy influence by choosing to support the formation of whichever type of organization will optimally send a signal of electoral threat to mainstream politicians. Institutions determine the different access costs for the various organizational mechanisms that can be used to send this signal, and also determine the associated response costs to mainstream politicians of making concessions to different organizational mechanisms. Therefore under particular institutional circumstances that affect these two cost parameters, interest group entry may surpass party entry as the optimal strategy for activists. The predictions of the model are assessed via a nested logit model using cross-national survey data on how activists have allocated their individual support to different organizational mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Do parties de-emphasize issues in response to internal divisions among their supporters, and are niche parties more likely to do so than mainstream parties? This study builds on previous research demonstrating that parties change their issue positions in response to their supporters. Simultaneously, a number of studies have emerged arguing that the linkage between parties and citizens is moderated by the type of party (mainstream versus niche). By means of a pooled time-series analysis of 197 parties in 14 West European countries between 1986 and 2006, this study provides convincing empirical evidence that parties downplay issues in response to internal divisions among their supporters. There are, however, no differences between niche and mainstream parties in their responsiveness to internal disagreement. This study has important implications for the literature on responsiveness between parties and their supporters, as well as for our understanding of the strategic behaviour of niche vis-à-vis mainstream parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to discuss the issue of niche parties and apply this approach on the Lithuanian case. The niche parties are analysed in the political science since the 1960s, focusing on small radical parties and also the single-issue parties that grew up in the postmodern West European societies. Nevertheless, during the next decades the single-issue parties were supplemented by other types of niche parties such as business-firm parties, media parties, generation parties, and protest parties. In the first part of our article we present the debate on the niche parties and also proper typology of niche parties. Successively we apply this typology on five Lithuania niche parties that are present in the contemporary Lithuanian party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]