Nové politické strany napříč Evropou: volební úspěch nových politických stran v dvaceti osmi evropských demokraciích
New Political Parties across Europe: Electoral Success of New Political Parties in Twenty-Eight European Democracies

Summary/Abstract: The entrance of new political parties to the party systems became a repeated phenomenon in the parliamentary elections across Europe. Political scientists often focus extensively on individual organisational or ideological types of new political parties or specific groups of European states. However, a comprehensive approach targeting new political parties in the EU area as a whole is lacking. The presented article fills this gap by presenting a comparative analysis of the rise of new political parties in all EU countries (as of January 2019) in the period from 1994 to 2018. The focus is not only on the new political subjects’ ability to surpass the electoral barrier and claim parliamentary mandates but, also on their ability to achieve success in recurring elections and ability to maintain and grow their representation. By analysing the electoral results, I find that new political parties grew significantly in popularity and power across Europe, both in established Western European democracies and in the new democracies of the post-communist bloc, especially after 2010. Despite early successes, an outright majority of new political subjects failed to repeat their initial success and root in party systems of their countries, becoming quickly marginalised and in many cases outright disappeared. These findings suggest that the development of new political parties is a shared European phenomenon, that needs to be viewed in the bigger European context to understand in which conditions they succeed to root into the political system, and in which they fail.

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