Changing Parties: Reframers, Start-ups and the Reshaping of European Politics

The success of new parties in contemporary Europe has generated a large body of scholarship. Much of the scholarship has tended to focus on specific countries or on either Western or Central & Eastern Europe and has focused primarily on developments in the 21st century. This paper draws on experiences from across the European continent to explain the emergence and electoral performance of new parties since the 1940s. We draw a distinction between reframers and start-ups examining both their organizational forms and ideational appeals. The former often ape the organizational structures of existing parties and reshape party competition in positional terms on the horizontal dimension of politics, the latter develop new forms of organization whose ideational appeal lies on a third vertical dimension of competition. This distinction helps not just to understand the different type of new parties that have emerged and why some parties have been successful, but also the role newness plays in the dynamics of European party systems.