ABSTRACT
Political parties are facing serious challenges in Europe, as more generally in advanced democracies. Decreasing party identification, increasing anti-party sentiments, fragmentation and personalization, rise of fringe parties: the catalogue is long and well known by now (Webb 2011). Although some recent works point to more mixed evidence on the crucial matter of party decline (Norris 2011; Dalton et al. 2011), parties nonetheless are in trouble. This is particularly evident in countries where the global economic crisis, which started in 2007–8, has hit hard, like in Southern Europe (Verney and Bosco 2013). These challenges include decreasing electoral turnout and high mobilization of social movements – such as the Indignados in Spain 2011 – but also the breakthrough of new political parties – for instance, Golden Dawn in Greece 2012 and the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, which gained 25 per cent in the 2013 polls. Turnout decline is part of a longer trend that involves most European countries (Franklin 2004), including those where parties are still deemed to command a reasonable amount of trust. On this topic, we now have a rich literature. On the other side, new parties have only recently started to attract a great deal of scholarly attention (Lucardie 2000; Deschouwer 2008; Litton 2013). True, the two latest party families that rose to national prominence in many European countries during the 1980s – Green parties and, especially, radical-right populists, henceforth RRP – have been widely researched (Müller-Rommel and Poguntke 2001; Mudde 2013). However, the situation is different for more recently born parties (defined here as parties born in the past decade).
