The economy and new political parties

• Autor(a) principal: Fernandes, Daniel Alves
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/23037
• topic: Partidos políticos; União Europeia - 1986-2015; Condições económicas; Economia de mercado

Does the economy affect the electoral success of new political parties? Despite the profound scholarly interest on this subject, previous studies have not found consistent empirical evidence linking economic conditions to new party success. We argue in this thesis that the lack of compelling evidence derives from incorrectly drawn expectations about this precise relationship. By and large, previous scholars claim that bad economic conjunctures drive voters to support new political parties. This seems not always to be the case, however, as voters can punish incumbents for poor economic performance by supporting opposition parties instead. As such, we argue that new parties only benefit from bad economic conditions if voters are discontented with the existing parties as a whole. We tested this hypothesis drawing on a unique dataset that comprises all elections to the national legislatures in west European countries of the European Union, from 1986 to 2015. Statistical evidence appears to corroborate the aforementioned claim. Unfavorable economic conjunctures benefit new entrants if there is a large pool of discontented individuals. On the other hand, poor economic performance appears to slightly hamper their electoral success if voters are fairly satisfied with the existing parties.