A Critical Review of Niche Party Literature: Extending Niche Parties to Central And Eastern Europe

This paper presents a systematic review of niche party literature and questions the applicability of existing concepts on political systems outside of advanced democracies. The paper draws attention to generalizability of existing concepts by elaborating on the ladder of abstraction and minimal definition. Then the paper proceeds to lay out the hypothetical and definitional characteristics of the existing niche party concepts. This analysis show that these concepts are context dependent and fail to serve their purpose. This point is then tested on data from 18 CEE countries between years 1990 - 2022 using the manifesto project. The results show that while Wagner’s measurement can identify some parties as niche and some others as mainstream, it fails to do so correctly. Meyer & Miller’s measurement fails to present a convincing differentiation of niche parties as all parties score similar nicheness levels. Bischof’s measurement reduces political party strategies to market strategies. Nicheness scores calculated with this measurement reflect the specialization scores closely. These shortcomings bring the explanatory power of these concepts into question. After discussing the findings, I bring center-periphery understanding of Shils forward as a framework along which the niche party literature should be reoriented. I argue that niche parties are those which do not advocate the policy positions corresponding to the central value system in a society. I argue that while this definition provides the researcher with a minimal definition, and maximum generalizability; it also encompasses the properties of previous concepts.