Young or New? A Temporal Approach to the Institutionalization of Party Systems

• In Event: Measuring, Assessing and Evaluating Changes in European Party Politics

Abstract

Using an original dataset that includes all European democracies since 1848, this paper aims to address three main deficiencies found in the literature dealing with the role of time in party system institutionalization. Firstly, existing studies do not have a proper conceptualization and operationalization of party system institutionalization. Not only do we separate the two, we also ask: how do the tendencies in the stabilization and destabilization of the electorates diverge from the parallel tendencies pertaining to party relations in the governmental arena? Secondly, most studies consider only currently existing party systems. We remedy this problem by including into our analysis democracies that collapsed and systems that are consequently now defunct. Finally, the existing analyses of the timeline of European party politics are either confined to Western European countries or consider Eastern European countries only in their post-communist phase. We offer a comprehensive account of party politics both in terms of geography and time. Above all, we examine the extent to which systemic closure is influenced by democratic experience and by the time of democratisation. In this context, we contrast two different currents of thought within the party politics literature: namely, the life-cycle (Converse, 1969; Mair, 1997) vs. the cohorts approach (Mainwaring and Zoco, 2007; Mainwaring et al. 2016). While we find a positive impact of the age of democracy on the level of institutionalisation of both electorates and party systems, we also demonstrate that the time of transition to democracy is inconsequential.

Authors

• Fernando Casal Bertoa, University of Nottingham

• Zsolt Enyedi, Central European University