VALTA3: 5 ECTS or VALTS2b: Ware, 4 ECTS.

'Successor Parties' in Contemporary Western Europe

This course is about new parties and especially one particular type of new party - the 'successor party'. New parties come - witness the Tea Party in the United States - and new parties go. Who can remember Risto E.J. Penttilä's Nuorsuomalainen puolue which gained two Eduskunta seats in 1995? New parties may attract much media interest, as in the case of New Democracy in Sweden, which described the 'old parties' as comprising crocodile politicians - 'all mouth and no ears'. New parties may be protest parties or they may belong to an established 'party family' (Christian Democrats, Greens etc). But there are new parties and new parties. Some are formed from splits in an existing party or a merger between existing parties; others are ?genuinely new? and not related to existing parties. Then there are those which directly replace parties that have ceased to exist. In this respect, the True Finns (PS) could be viewed as a 'successor party', replacing the defunct Finnish Rural Party (SMP). So the course is about new parties, the various types of new party, why some are successful and others not and what significance new parties have for the party system as a whole.

What follows are the main course themes rather than a detailed lecture programme.

1. How are new parties formed?

- Surveying the cosmos of new parties since the Second World War (Christian Democrat, left-libertarian, populist radical right etc)

- Where do parties come from? - the nature of the founding context and the process of party origination

- Classifying parties on the basis of how they originated (Duverger, Sartori)

- Approaches to the formation of new parties: Harmel and Robertson; Mair etc

2. Towards a Typology of New Parliamentary Parties in Contemporary Europe

- Identifying new parties: the fusion party, the re-nominated party; the seceder party; new blood party and the successor party

- The communist successor parties in Central-Eastern Europe

- The loose use of the term 'successor party' in the West European party literature: post-war successor parties, post-communist successor parties

- Definition and characteristics of the successor party

3. When is a new party a new party?

- Why do new parties matter? (Sartori, Bolleyer) How new is a new party?

- How can we assess the 'newness' of a party?

- Barnea and Rahat?s distinction between 'new' and 'pseudo-new' parties: "All parties are not new until proven otherwise"

- Threshold-based definitions and an application to the Austrian Freedom Party

4. The True Finns- From 'successor party' to 'new party'?

- Is the True Finn Party a new party in no more than name, how does it differ from its predecessor, the Finnish Rural Party, and has it evolved into something genuinely new?

- This will serve as a case-study and apply a modified version of Barnea and Rahat's schema

5. The 'Tavits question': Who do new parties emerge even in well-established party systems'?

- Why do they emerge and what makes some new parties successful and others less so?

- The permissiveness of the electoral system

- The extent of neo-corporatist policy-making

- The institutionalisation of the party system

Course Assessment: 8-10 page essay (English or Finnish) = 80%; Group Discussion = 20%

Obligatory pre-registering for this course, see 'enrolment'. Limited number of participants accepted.

Please register in advance for this course by emailing david.arter(at)uta.fi by 16 December!

NB. Pre-registration is obligatory for this course. Only a limited number of participants are accepted.