The New Party Challenge Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond

Why do some parties live fast and die young, but others endure? And why are some party systems more stable than others? Based on a blend of data derived from both qualitative and quantitative sources, The New Party Challenge develops new tools for mapping and measuring party systems, and develops conceptual frameworks to analyse the dynamics of party politics, particularly the birth and death of parties. In addition to highlighting the importance of agency and choice in explaining the fate of parties, the book underlines the salience of the clean versus corrupt dimension of politics, charts the flow of voters in the new party subsystem, and emphasizes the dimension of time and its role in shaping developments. The New Party Challenge not only provides the first systematic book length study of political parties across Central Europe in the three decades since the 1989 revolutions, charting and explaining the patterns of politics in that region, it also highlights that similar processes are at play on a far wider geographical canvas. The book concludes by reflecting on what the dynamics of party politics, especially the emergence of so many new parties, means for the health and quality of democracy, and what could and should be done.

Tim Haughton, Reader (Associate Professor) in European Politics, University of Birmingham,Kevin Deegan-Krause, Associate Professor of Political Science, Wayne State University

Tim Haughton is Reader (Associate Professor) in European Politics at the University of Birmingham. He has a particular interest in electoral and party politics, electoral campaigning, the role of the past in the politics of the present, and the domestic politics of Central and Eastern Europe. He has published widely in a number of leading scholarly journals, written several articles for the Washington Post and was the co-editor of the Journal of Common Market Studies Annual Review of the European Union from 2008-2016.


Kevin Deegan-Krause is Associate Professor of Political Science at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. His research focuses on political parties and democracy in Europe with emphasis on Europe's newer democracies and its newer parties. He is the author of Elected Affinities: Democracy and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (Stanford University Press 2006), several edited books and numerous articles, and from 2011 to 2017 was co-editor of the European Journal of Political Research Political Data Yearbook.