Happy Protest Voters: The Case of Rotterdam 1997–2009

Protest parties are on the rise in several European countries. This development is commonly attributed to a growing dissatisfaction with life and associated with declining quality of life in modern society of the lowest social strata. This explanation is tested in a cross-sectional analysis of voting and life-satisfaction in 63 districts of the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where the share of protest voters increased from 10 % in 1994 to 31 % in 2009. Contrary to this explanation protest voting appeared not to be the most frequent in the least happy districts of Rotterdam, but in the medium happy segment. Also divergent from this explanation was that average happiness in city districts is largely independent of local living conditions, but is rather a matter of personal vulnerability in terms of education, income and health. These results fit alternative explanations in terms of mid

Economy, corruption or floating voters? Explaining the breakthroughs of Anti-Establishment Reform Parties in Eastern Europe

This paper discusses a new group of parties that we term anti-establishment reform parties (AERPs), which combine moderate social and economic policies with anti-establishment appeals and a desire to change the way politics is conducted. We analyse the electoral breakthroughs of AERPs in Eastern Europe (CEE), the region where AERPs have so been most successful. Examples include the Simeon II National Movement, GERB (Bulgaria), Res Publica (Estonia), New Era (Latvia), TOP09 and Public Affairs (Czech Republic) and Positive Slovenia. We examine the conditions under which such parties broke through in nine CEE states in 1997-2012 using Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). We find five sufficient causal paths combining high or rising corruption, rising unemployment and party system instability. Rising corruption plays a key role in most pathways but, unexpectedly, AERP breakthroughs are more closely associated with economic good times than bad

Dynamics of new party formation in the Czech Republic 1996–2010: looking for the origins of a ‘political earthquake’

The stable and closed nature of the Czech party system and the failure of most new political parties have been among the most salient features of Czech democracy over the past two decades. The results of the 2010 parliamentary elections seemed to mark a break with this pattern: support for two main parties slumped to historically low levels and two new parties, TOP09 and Public Affairs (VV), entered parliament. This article seeks to put the ‘political earthquake’ of 2010 into perspective by mapping the development of new parties in the Czech Republic from the mid-1990s and relating them to comparative literature and typologies of new party emergence. It concludes that of the two successful new parties in 2010, Public Affairs was, by far, the more novel and important phenomenon

Hurricane Season: Systems of Instability in Central and East European Party Politics

The seemingly random triumph and demise of new political parties in Central and Eastern Europe actually represent a durable subsystem with relevance for party systems around the world. This article supplements existing research on volatility with new measures of party age distribution that reveal clear patterns of disruption, turnover and restabilization. These patterns emerge from stable and coherent party subsystems that follow a simple model based on three dynamics: losses by established parties, rapid gains by uncorrupted newcomers, and equally rapid newcomer losses to even newer parties. Confirmed both by electoral evidence and computer simulations, this model offers insight into the endurance of these subsystems, particularly since the very mechanisms that generate new parties’ success can preclude their ability to survive in subsequent elections. Central and Eastern European party systems offer a laboratory for understanding trends in party system volatility that are emerging in Western Europe and across the globe. </jats:p