Conclusion and Limitations of the Study

In conclusion, the number of new parties indicates that there is a tendency for new challengers to enter the electoral arena and a general regression of traditional political formations from their historic power. Nevertheless, most challengers misinterpret the mood of the public and provide an offer that does not attract majoritarian support, even though it allows for more parties to enter parliament than before the World Financial Crisis of 2008. However, very few subjects have managed to penetrate the system successfully, and even fewer have done so in a manner that guarantees political continuation and longevity. A number of parties that have managed to penetrate to governmental positions find themselves severely weakened at this moment in time, whilst the ones that continue to dominate the party scene in their countries are the ones that share the following innovative characteristics that clearly separate them from their competition:

openness to membership, technological activism, less leadership dominated and ideologically flexible. Lack of any of these features, downgrades parties to a smaller support base and appeal, whilst lack of all of these features makes the parties indistinguishable in terms of their organization for the more traditional model of “catch-all” parties, that as argued by a number of scholars, and as seen in the study, is currently evolving.

Nevertheless, the system still remains resilient and it is apparent that the party system in Europe is not under a process of revolution, but merely one of evolution, as it is natural for changing societies. New political formations arise to capitalize on the grievances and the request of the public for new political models, however the established political parties remain the most important players in the electoral arena and still enjoy majoritarian support in most European societies. A change of personnel is always required to regenerate the political class, and the protest vote towards new smaller parties, reflects this request, rather than a tendency to fundamentally reject the general order of things.

As mentioned in the introductory remarks the goal of this paper is to identify the existence (or lack thereof), of a trend which might indicate that the current catch-all party system is under threat, which if true, in line with the party evolution literature would indicate that the party system is evolving and changing, an implication that would entail many consequences in the international level of global finance and international institutions. However, the party system is unique in every country as democratic transition, the history of partisanship, the peculiarity of political figures that run as candidates and the socio-economic conditions of every country make such a general study impossible to control every single variable.

The most important controls that need to be introduced in a more quantitative and accurate research would certainly be the electoral system, which as underlined above is crucial in inciting the formation of new political parties or discouraging them, and how hard was the country hit

62 by the economic crisis. E.g., the UK although it went through a long period of austerity and political crisis surrounding the issue of Brexit did not have many new parties created, even though there were many defections and factions within the system. This is almost exclusively due to the First Past the Post electoral system that makes it almost impossible to break the party system.

Furthermore, regarding the issue of the economic crisis, although the paper was able to indicate that the countries hit more by the economic crisis tend to be prone on having more new political subjects, this specific variable needs to be more integrated and studied further to draw more conclusive results on the direct relationship that the World Financial Crisis had on the party systems of Europe and how it affected electoral configuration.

In addition, there are a number of parties which did not fit the criteria set to be considered a successful party by not being the major opposition party, or part of the government, who nonetheless pose a threat to the status-quo with their exponential increase in vote share and upward trend. Most notably the far-right party VOX, in Spain managed to jump from around 3% to 15.1% (Europe Elects) and become the third biggest party in the country from one election cycle to the other. Furthermore, the Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands has been ranked as first party in some polls at different times and recently won the regional elect ion in the country (although as mentioned above regional, local, and European elections are not the best metric to predict national electoral results). In Greece (Greek Solution), Portugal (Enough) and other countries newly created far-right formations are increasingly gaining more popularity and vote support, which needs to be accounted for even though these parties have not managed to find themselves in position of governmental power, thus far. An additional measurement to be taken into consideration could also be the effect that the refugee crisis of 2015 had on voting behaviours, which could be viewed as another moment which generated support for anti-establishment parties to consolidate their presence in the electoral arena. Nevertheless, the large sample in my opinion does serve the purpose of showing the general trend, or common patterns that seem to be distinguishable in every consolidated democracy in Europe.

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Appendix

Table 5. Sources regarding the Structure and History of the “Fully Successful” Political Parties

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