Introducing the New Political Parties Data Set

• In Event: The Development of Parties and Party Systems

Abstract

The creation of political parties is a vital part of public life in democracies. Despite this, almost all publicly available data sets on elections completely overlook new or small political parties by lumping them into the “other” category. As a result, researchers in political parties often find themselves looking at the tip of the iceberg, when the vast majority of new party creation occurs under the surface.

To address this, the New News Project has created the New Parties Data Set, which collects bibliographic and electoral information on new political parties over the course of three (potential) elections across a representative sample of democratic countries in Europe, North America, and Oceania, from 1945 to the present day. In doing so, our data set is the first of its kind, and will provide a more complete picture of new party creation for interested researchers.

This paper introduces the New Parties Data Set by looking at attrition rates vote shares for new parties for different countries. The paper then discusses the relationship between voter turnout in the previous election as a predictor of the number of new parties in the current election. While previous data sets have focused on (often time invariant) variables such as registration costs, public party financing, and average district magnitude, we use the New Parties Data Set to suggest that new parties often are formed in response to low voter turnout.

Authors

• Stuart Bramwell

• Joost van Spanje, Royal Holloway University of London