Why Parties Narrow Their Representative Profile: Evidence from Six European Democracies

Major datasets widely used in the field—for instance the Manifesto Project Dataset – tend to focus on parties with parliamentary representation or significant vote shares. Similarly, cross-national studies on new parties tend to focus on those parties that win a minimum share of the national vote or, alternatively, achieve parliamentary representation (e.g. Kitschelt 1989; Krouwel and Lucardie 2008; Rose and Mackie 1988; but see Hug 2001). For a detailed review, see Bolleyer (2013, Chap. 2).

All parties surveyed participated in the last national election and were active when the survey was launched.

Note that the concept of niche party is distinct from the concept of single-issue party. While directly contradicting the definition of niche party as used by Meguid (2005), the definition of single-issue party by Mudde as “(1) having an electorate with no particular social structure; (2) being supported predominantly on the basis of one single issue; (3) lacking an ideological programme; and (4) addressing only one all-encompassing issue” (1999, p. 182) is too specific for our purposes (as Mudde shows it does not suitably describe extreme right parties that are commonly subsumed under the niche party concept together with Green and regional parties, for instance). More importantly, as single-issue parties are commonly considered very short-lived, they have not been theorised in terms of programmatic adaptation, which is the focus of this paper.

Furthermore, the concept of small party is most usefully conceptualised in relative terms, in the context of its party system, meaning parties of the same absolute size can enjoy advantages in one type of party system but not in another (Bolleyer 2007). Being a niche party as a party-level property is expected to have the same consequences irrespective of their systemic context.

Support-party status is usually restricted to specific policy areas in which a party is willing to provide legislative support to a minority government, while still opposing the government in policy areas outside the agreement, which is why we expect this rationale to hold only for parties holding ministries and forming part of the cabinet.

This is not to say that there cannot be situations in which certain group of activists might favour more extreme forms of change (including policy change) than leaders. However, to the extent that members have been recruited into the party based on, and are committed to the party with, a given profile, the general expectation can be formulated that they are less open to strategic alterations to a party’s profile than (success-oriented) leaders are.

To ensure comparability across first-past-the-post/mixed and list PR systems, in electoral systems with single-member constituencies we only included parties that run in more than one constituency (or in mixed systems also run with a list) to ensure all parties were active beyond one single locality.

Deregistration from formal registers is an unreliable indication of parties’ dissolution as not all registers require parties to run regular elections or update information to stay registered and therefore often contain inactive parties.

Our sample is representative of the party population in terms of parliamentary representation (parliamentary parties represent 23% of the population, and 28% of our sample) and ideological representativeness (including parties from all party families).

This is the case for Switzerland; all other country samples include parties with electoral support higher than 24% of the national vote.

Descriptive statistics on all variables used in the analysis including a correlation table can be found in the Appendix (see Tables A.1 and A.2).

This period is suitable as a leader needs time to become established in office before being able to implement reforms, which is usually a slow process.

In parties with collective leadership structures we considered the replacement of one core figure to be sufficient. This avoided a bias in favour of finding leadership change in centralised, leader-centred parties, had we required all leadership figures to be replaced in parties with several. In cases of parties that refused to have a formal leader, we considered the party spokesperson to be occupying a functionally equivalent role. In the few cases where there were neither leaders nor formal spokespeople, we consulted party publications and available case-study literature regarding who belonged to the core leadership and whether any of them was replaced in the relevant period (see Bolleyer and Bytzek 2017).

Note that diagnostic tests indicate that collinearity is not a problem.

As a robustness check we have rerun our analysis modifying the temporal sequence between the independent and dependent variables. Accordingly, we have included values capturing the situation two elections ago for Funding access, Government access, and Parliamentary parties. For Member control over policy we have included the values from a survey question asking for the situation five years prior to the survey’s launch. The significance of these variables remains the same.