It is often thought that small party survival or failure is a result of institutional constraints, the behavior of large parties, and the choices of individual politicians. Jae-Jae Spoon, in contrast, argues that the decisions made by small parties themselves determine their ability to balance the dual goals of remaining true to their ideals while maximizing their vote and seat shares, thereby enabling them to survive even in adverse electoral systems. Spoon employs a mixed-methods approach in order to explore the policy, electoral, and communication strategies of West European Green Parties from 1980 to the present. She combines cross-national data on these parties with in-depth comparative case studies of two New Politics parties, the French and British Green Parties, that have survived in similar national-level plurality electoral systems. Both of these parties have developed as organizations which run candidates in elections at the local, national, and European levels in their respective countries. The parties’ survival, Spoon asserts, results from their ability to balance their competing electoral, policy, and communication goals.

Strategic choices allow small parties to balance their interests and achieve success

This book provides an introduction to the green party phenomenon in Western Europe that will enable the student of comparative politics to acquire detailed understanding of the green parties and to compare them meaningfully across countries.

Why do some parties live fast and die young, but other endure? And why are some party systems more stable than others? Based on a blend of data derived from both qualitative and quantitative sources, The New Party Challenge develops new tools for mapping and measuring party systems, and develops conceptual frameworks to analyse the dynamics of party politics, particularly the birth and death of parties. In addition to highlighting the importance of agency and choice in explaining the fate of parties, the book underlines the salience of the clean versus corrupt dimension of politics, charts the flow of voters in the new party subsystem, and emphasizes the dimension of time and its role in shaping developments. The New Party Challenge not only provides the first systematic book length study of political parties across Central Europe in the three decades since the 1989 revolutions, charting and explaining the patterns of politics in that region, it also highlights that similar processes are at play on a far wider geographical canvas. The book concludes by reflecting on what the dynamics of party politics, especially the emergence of so many new parties, means for the health and quality of democracy, and what could and should be done.

The scope and intensity of the challenges currently faced by western European political parties is exceptionally large, threatening the viability of the manner in which they have traditionally operated and causing them to seek new behaviours and strategies. This volume brings together some of the foremost scholars of European party politics, whose evaluation of political parties in 'the new Europe' is organised under four broad headings: Parties as Corporate Actors; Parties and Society; Parties and the State and Parties Beyond the Nation State. Each contributor not only provides a concise, critical review of the theoretical and methodological 'state of the art' in respect of a specific aspect, but also reviews the latest empirical findings in that area.

Party System Closure maps trends in interparty relations in Europe from 1848 until 2019. It investigates how the length of democratic experience, the institutionalization of individual parties, the fragmentation of parliaments, and the support for anti-establishment parties, shape the degree of institutionalization of party systems. The analyses presented answer the questions of whether predictability in partisan interactions is necessary for the survival of democratic regimes and whether it improves or undermines the quality of democracy. The developments of party politics at the elite level are contrasted with the dynamics of voting behaviour. The comparisons of distinct historical periods and of macro-regions provide a comprehensive picture of the European history of party competition and cooperation. The empirical overview presented in the book is based on a novel conceptual framework and features party composition data of more than a thousand European governments. Party systems are analysed in terms of poles and blocs, and the degree of closure and of polarization is related to a new party system typology. The book demonstrates that information collected from partisan interactions at the time of government formation can reveal changes that characterise the party system as a whole. The empirical results confirm that the Cold War period (1945-1989) was exceptionally stable, while the post-Berlin-Wall era shows signs of disintegration, although more at the level of voters than at the level of elites. After three decades of democratic politics in Europe (1990-2019), the West and the South are looking increasingly like the East, especially in terms of the level of party de-institutionalization. The West and the South are becoming more polarised than the East, but in terms of parliamentary fragmentation, the party systems of the South and the East are converging, while the West is diverging from the rest with its increasingly high number of parties. As far as our central concept, party system closure, is concerned, thanks to the gradual process of stabilization in the East, and the recent de-institutionalization in the West and South, the regional differences are declining. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston, and Jonathan Slapin, Professor of Political Institutions and European Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.