ABSTRACT
In the course of declining party identification and growing electoral volatility, newly founded parties face increased opportunities to attract electoral support in a range of established Western democracies (Harmel and Robertson 1985; Hug 2001; Keman and Krouwel 2006; Mair 1999, 2002). This is reflected by the growing number of party foundations in the last decades and, even more importantly, by the frequent success of these new parties in gaining parliamentary representation on the regional and the national level. Such an empirical development has quite naturally motivated scholars to examine the reasons for the success or failure of new parties. Three questions are relevant here. They are logically connected but point to only partially overlapping if not different sets of explanatory factors (Hug 2000): first, under which circumstances are new parties founded? Second, when do they overcome electoral thresholds and, as a consequence, gain representation? And third, a question which, so far, has attracted lesser attention: under which conditions are new parties able to enter government and what are the consequences of doing so?
