METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF NEW PARTIES' ENTRY AND ELECTORAL SUCCESS

Studies of the emergence and electoral success of new parties frequently suffer from conceptual and methodological flaws: effects of electoral institutions that primarily operate at the level of the constituencies are specified at the national level; central explanatory variables such as electoral demands and competitors' responses are measured with crude proxies; the interplay of formation and success is overlooked; and empirical models neglect the point that the underlying data may exhibit dependencies both in space and time. In this article, we highlight these problems and offer some potential solutions using the Swiss Green Party (GPS) as an empirical case.