Spillover and Steppingstone? Party Parliamentary Trajectories in Multi-Level System

Providing multiple access points, multi-level system structures are assumed to facilitate the rise of new political parties. They seem to offer opportunities for parties to use their first parliamentary representation at one level as a steppingstone to succeed on other levels or leverage their parliamentary presence at one level to gain more visibility and build their reputation to access other levels. In European multi-level system with three governmental tiers –national, regional, and EU, many parties, especially radical right or niche parties, begin their parliamentary career at non-national levels (regional and EU) and expand their parliamentary representation across three levels. Spanish radical left party Podemos started out at EU level and later get established at regional and national levels, respectively. Czech Pirate party began their career at regional level and later secured representation at both national and EU levels. What can account for such interaction effects between different levels? Under which condition does securing parliamentary representation at one level helps parties secure parliamentary representation at the other levels? To the best of my knowledge, we lack a systematic understanding and mechanism for how institutional structures of multi-level system affect party parliamentary trajectories. To shed light on this, I have collected a novel dataset that records more than 2,000 electoral entries of parliamentary parties in 13 European multi-level countries. My findings illustrate that interaction effects between levels on party parliamentary trajectories vary across party family, the ability of issues to be mobilized beyond a single level, election cycle, regional authority, as well as the duration of countries’ exposure of the three-tier system.