Conventional theories of ethnic politics argue that political entrepreneurs form ethnic parties where there is ethnic diversity. Yet empirical research finds that diversity is a weak predictor for the success of ethnic parties. When does ethnicity become a major element of party competition? Scholars have explained the emergence of an ethnic dimension in party systems as the result of institutions, mass organizations, and elite initiatives. But these factors can evolve in response to an emerging ethnic coalition of voters. The author advances a new theory: ethnic cleavages emerge when voters seek to form a parliamentary opposition to government policies that create grievances along ethnic identities. The theory is tested on rare cases of government policies in Prussia between 1848 and 1874 that aggrieved Catholics but were not based on existing policies or initiated by entrepreneurs to encourage ethnic competition. Using process tracing, case comparisons, and statistical analysis of electoral returns, the author shows that Catholics voted together when aggrieved by policies, regardless of the actions of political entrepreneurs. In contrast, when policies were neutral to Catholics, the Catholic party dissolved.

The rise in support for anti-political-establishment parties (APEp), especially since the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession, has put democracy in peril. Some scholars have warned us about the negative implications the recent rise of APEp might have for the development of democracy in Western Europe. For that reason, it is important we begin to understand what generates APEp’s electoral success. Drawing on a new comparative dataset that examines all Western European democracies from 1849 until 2017, the current article attempts to provide an explanation. In particular, our analyses examine three alternative explanations put forward by the literature: economic, institutional, and sociological. Our results show that it is not economic performance but both institutional and sociological change which together can help to understand the current wave of support for APEp.

This paper re-evaluates the party system change in Turkey based on Sartori’s framework. It also explores the role of opposition parties in this. The paper suggests that, while a fragmented opposition may lead to the emergence of a one-party government and/or military intervention because of the high levels of polarization it induces, bilateral opposition prolongs one-party governments. The paper relies on an analysis of party programs and public opinion surveys in order to position the parties in terms of spatial distance and to understand the level of polarization.

In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, new and challenger parties have enjoyed electoral gains in some European countries. Political and economic disaffection have been pointed out as the main drivers of their electoral support. This article proposes voter’s stealth democracy attitudes, as defined by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, as an additional driving force to account for this electoral change. We examine the case of Spain with a survey conducted after the far-reaching transformation of the party system, which has led to the emergence of two new parties: Ciudadanos (on the center-right) and Podemos (on the radical-left). We find that stealth democracy attitudes are positively related to the support for the former and negatively related to the support for the latter. Additionally, we provide evidence of this relationship being conditional on voters’ ideology. The study illustrates how an unexplored attitudinal dimension contributes to party system change, and how the relevance of these attitudes might go beyond the temporary political discontent caused by the economic crisis.

Like many party systems across Western Europe, the Dutch party system has been in flux since 2002 as a result of a series of related developments, including the decline of mainstream parties which coincided with the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties and the concurrent dimensional transformation of the political space. This article analyses how these challenges to mainstream parties fundamentally affected the structure of party competition. On the basis of content analysis of party programmes, we examine the changing configuration of the Dutch party space since 2002 and investigate the impact of these changes on coalition-formation patterns. We conclude that the Dutch party system has become increasingly unstable. It has gradually lost its core through electoral fragmentation and mainstream parties’ positional shifts. The disappearance of a core party that dominates the coalition-formation process initially transformed the direction of party competition from centripetal to centrifugal. However, since 2012 a theoretically novel configuration has emerged in which no party or coherent group of parties dominates competition.