Volumen 15 (2019): Heft 1 (June 2019)

The 2016 Elections to the National Council in Slovakia are considered a political earthquake. Social Democrats lost 34 out of 83 seats, the Euro sceptic party SaS almost doubled its representation, the nationalistic Slovak National Party returned to the Parliament with 15 seats and three „newcomers” entered the Parliament: the (neo) fascist Kotleba – ĽSNS, conservative We are Family (SME RODINA – Boris Kollár) and centrist #Network (#Sieť). Changes in composition raised questions about party system institutionalization and opened a debate about challenging trends within the Slovak party system including fragmentation, aggregation, high volatility, anti-systemness or alternation. Moreover, it again opened the issue of party newness and consolidation. This article deals with current trends in the context of the 2016 elections and tries to examine the current state of the Slovak Party system.

This paper contributes to the debate on entrepreneurial parties with the empirical example of the Czech ANO party. The authors focus on selected aspects of the internal organisation and functioning of the party, emphasising the points where business methods and practices are transferred to the environment of party politics. The empirical part shows how the leader has built loyalty inside the party, and analyses its methods of control and coercion that are similar to the human resources recruitment techniques used in businesses. The authors investigate such matters as the vetting of candidates for public offices, the significant barriers created against those wishing to join the party and the party leadership’s strict control over membership. The article also describes the development of ANO’s electoral-professional services and the creation of mass media support. In conclusion, the authors discuss the broader future for the internal workings of entrepreneurial parties – including their lack of intra-party democracy – and their relationship with the changing landscape of contemporary party politics.

New political parties can be essential holders of party systems’ change. A lot of scholars underline this reality. In fact, it is often not enough only to establish a new political subject. There is a significant relationship between a new party emergence and the subsequent electoral success, which is often an overlooked research dimension. This article intends to focus on the most important features narrowly connected with new political parties’ study approaches. There is no concurrence on what a new political party exactly is. It is possible to find a whole range of high-quality based articles exploring newness in a current or recent state of knowledge. Despite it, this research still has several substantial doubts about this question. Examples of Czech political parties that have been successful in the first-order elections (FOE) and where the problematic aspects of their declared novelty can be traced will be compared here. The evidence of complexity pertaining to this phenomenon is obvious: every political party is new in the moment of its formation in reality, but on the other hand not every political party is new regarding an appropriate theoretical concept. This empirical base shows that declared novelty can be rather more a tool of broader communication and image strategy than a real indisputable party attribute.

The aim of the paper is to assess new political parties in Poland and to examine the question of their perceived novelty and influence on the party system. We employ Barnea and Rahat’s analytical framework to evaluate the newness of Polish parties in three party facets: party-in-the-electorate, party-as-organisation, party-in-government. This multi-dimensional analysis allows one to identify those fields in which any novelty may occur. Among the analysed factors is the new parties’ electoral base that enables one to assess whether the parties managed to mobilise a new electorate or rather attracted supporters from existing parties instead. Last but not least, we study the changes caused by these parties within the whole party system. In our research we include parties that entered the parliament for the first time after the last two elections: in 2011 and 2015. Before that time the parliamentary scene in Poland seemed to be firmly closed with a nearly constant set of actors. Both in the 2005 and 2007 elections no new parties entered parliament. Hence the 2011 election is considered to be an opening for new parties, but does not necessarily bring about a significant change in the Polish party system in terms of the electoral support for the two largest parties or within patterns of electoral competition.

While no stranger to new political parties, Slovenia’s party system became much more unstable after 2008 with the constant arrival of electorally very successful parties. Further, while the citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and trust in political institutions has never reached the heights seen in Western Europe, the crisis years saw them drop to historical lows. In these circumstances, one may expect successful new parties to assure greater responsiveness, or a balance between responsible and responsive politics, and to bring improvements to citizens’ opinion on their satisfaction with democracy and trust in political institutions. In addition, new parties are usually more prone to democratic innovations, which can be associated with the popular idea of introducing stronger intra-party democracy in their internal functioning. The analysis shows that in 2014 Slovenia experienced both the nadir of public opinion on democracy and the political system, and the most electorally successful new party. Nevertheless, improvements in satisfaction with democracy and the political system only slowly emerged after 2014, to a considerable extent coinciding with the return to economic prosperity, while even these improvements left enough room for yet another successful new party at the 2018 elections. Concerning innovations in intra-party democracy, we are only able to identify some smaller democratic innovations. Given this, it seems that the new parties themselves have had a relatively limited impact on democracy in Slovenia.

Serbian party system is in the phase of reconfiguration which can be perceived as the outcome of domestic incentives (crisis of democratic transition and of democratic rule) and the international one (economic and migrant crisis). On one side, this reconfiguration includes emergence of predominant ruling party (Serbian Progressive Party, SNS) with strong leader and popular support; on the other side, the opposition camp has been atomized into number of smaller parties. Most of these parties are the new one (including the SNS) and founded after 2008 elections and creation of pro-EU consensus among relevant parties; post-2008 period has been characterized by the decline of almost all old parties, followed by emergence, partial success and fast decline of a large number of new actors. In this paper I am investigating if these new parties can be explained as the unexpected consequence of ideological and political stability after 2008 elections, tactical narrowing of the ideological space and cartelization of the party system. Analysis will focus at populist and anti-partisan ideas, their interplay and different ideological interpretation.

Recent years have seen the formation of new parties across Europe that challenge established patterns of party competition and coalition-building during elections. While a similar trend of party creation has occurred in Montenegro, these new parties have failed to „deinstitutionalise” the party system. This article tracks the development process for new parties. At the same time, it looks at factors and settings that have enabled (or impeded) the institutionalisation of these parties and their relative success in parliamentary elections. Two peculiar findings arise from my analysis. First, it appears that the fragmentation of the traditional party system has only happened among opposition parties (with the notable exception of a split among social democrats). This raises questions about the reasons for this process and its effect on party competition. It also leads to a second finding: though more than five effective political parties have been created since 2012, they have failed to change established party competition. To a limited degree, these parties have shifted the focus of public debate from identity politics to the economy, but the party system remains highly ientrenched. In other words, coalition-building is as predictable as ever.