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Conceptual and Methodological Aspects of New Political Parties' Research

Publication at Faculty of Social Sciences |
2020

Abstract

New political parties are an object of interest in many studies, either in the form of theoretical anchoring to relevant concepts or in the search for further theoretical overlaps. However, there is not a general agreement in political parties' research on how exactly to classify a new political party and how precisely newness is measured and captured.

New parties may be an important element in analysing the entire transformation of the party system. This text is a discussion paper to introduce and debate various analytical perspectives on the analysis of new parties, which have not yet achieved much in the Czech environment.

In addition to the current state of knowledge, three major problems will be outlined, such as the absence of a generally accepted definition of a new political party, the applicability of different theoretical frameworks, and the question of continuity or discontinuity of individual new or established actors. The text aims to discuss the possibilities of measuring novelty as a dichotomous variable.

Each of the presented approaches has its advantages and its pitfalls, depending on the empirical reality and the justification of the author's preferred analytical approach.