What’s New? How to Refine our Assessments of Party Novelty

Abstract

Scholars have disagreed over how to assess and measure what constitutes a ‘new’ political party. The different understandings of newness matter because they are used in attempts to measure the overall instability of party systems, often producing widely varying results for volatility calculations. There are multiple approaches to assessing novelty. Some are rooted in studying party origins, while others are based on party attributes, and there is a wide range of views on the thresholds for what counts as new. Combining the origin and attribute approaches provides the best way of understanding the degree of change. The chapter assesses parties on a multi-level range of change from ‘Continuation’ through to ‘Inception’. This range permits both stricter and looser definitions to be used to determine the level and extent of newness in a political system, and thus works around the problem of inconsistent evaluations of parties and conflicting methods of classification.