New Political Parties. What are They and How to Study Them?

Economic, social and political crises cause that mainstream parties lose their electoral support. This paves the way for new parties and political movements. However, new parties are not always genuinely new, sometimes they are merger or split parties or from other reasons can be considered as continuation of previously existing parties. The question is what does constitute a new party? Is it a new name, structure, taking part in election for the first time or competing on new issue? Newness is usually not a dichotomous variable, parties are not just new or old, they are new to some extent or in some areas, hence multi-dimensional analyses are required in order to assess the party novelty. Barnea and Rahat (2010) pointed out that newness can occur in three key areas: party in the electorate, party as organisation and party in government. However, in each area newness is deemed as dichotomous variable in their concept. We know in which area party is new, but not to which extent. In turn, the concept of Sikk and Köker (2017) introduces the interval scale of party novelty that enables to assess the level of newness, however, they limited their framework to only some areas of party activity, among others omitting party programmatic stances. The paper is of conceptual nature. After brief overview of existing concepts, a new analytical framework will be discussed that draws from the existing concepts but aims both to cover three areas of party activity and to assess level of party newness in each of them. The framework will be tested in further study of Polish political parties that have emerged since the collapse of communism. There is an assumption that parties which are perceived as new are often more or less ‘rooted newcomers’ (‘old wine in new wineskins’), hence the stability of party system can be more significant than it is supposed what is to be proven.