ABSTRACT
In the past decades, parliamentary turnover has been studied at large, to explain some hypotheses derived from the classic elite theories. For instance, democratic stability depends on a “sufficient” but not “revolutionary” degree of elite turnover, and on a rather regular pace of elite circulation. In turn, the stability of party systems all over Europe—the phenomenon also known as freezing proposition introduced by Lipset and Rokkan—has traditionally represented the other classic explanation of a modest but continuous pattern of elite turnover. More recently several scholars—Matland and Studlar among the others—have clarified that parliamentary turnover depends on a number of structural and institutional determinants, explaining significant rates of diachronic and country by country variation. On the other hand, as the studies of Heinrich Best have showed, social transformations and the decay of the classic mass parties have challenged the regularity of elite circulation which had characterized the second half of the twentieth century. This chapter provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical framework to cope with these puzzles and it proposes an explorative empirical test on the determinants of parliamentary elite turnover during the first decade of the twenty-first century in a number of European democracies.
