Which New Parties Promote Democratic Innovations: Comparing Eastern and Western Europe

Democratic innovations, in the form of direct and deliberative democracy, are often associated with political parties that emerged in the most recent 15 years. However, recent large-scale comparisons show that there are many new political parties that do not promote democratic innovations. The question that arises is: which new parties favour the use of direct and deliberative democracy? This paper seeks to provide an answer by comparing the election manifestos of all the new parties that got at least 1% in the most recent national legislative elections, organized between 2021 and 2024, in 28 European countries. New political parties are those that contested a maximum number of two consecutive elections. The key argument of the paper is that new political parties formed after a split from parties that do not support democratic innovations are unlikely to support them. The statistical analysis controls also for ideology, vote share, presence in government and leadership change.