Why are new parties being formed?
There was a time when the difficult question was the other way around: How could everything around us change – the economy, religiosity, the very composition of social classes – and party systems remain static? The answer had a name – the freezing hypothesis. The political parties of Europe, the experts said, were nothing more than fossils of a historical conjuncture. A moment in which universal suffrage coincided – not accidentally – with the flowering of the labor movement and froze, within the first mass parties, the most important division of the era: the social class. What came after found the system already built, with strong reflexes and prone to historical inertia.
Behind this almost axiomatic observation was a whole sequence, eloquently described by political scientists Peter Mair and Stefano Bartolini. Social cleavage is first born as an objective social entity. Then it acquires consciousness and becomes an identity. And only at the end does it turn into an organization and a party. First the cleavage, then the identity, lastly the representation. The party was the sediment of a social reality that had already matured.
All of this has been largely disproven by history itself. For decades, party systems have been the opposite of stable. New parties are constantly springing up, left and right – metaphorically and otherwise. To explain this change, many have turned to political scientist William Riker. Rikerian logic reverses the order: The party does not come to express a preexisting social cleavage. It is the political entrepreneur who creates a new issue in order to divide an existing coalition and claim space within the political system. Identity does not precede the party; it is constructed by the party.
