The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond(Comparative Politics)

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.

Table of Contents:
1: Puzzles of Party Politics: How Central Europe Challenges What We Know About Continuity and Change 2: What's New?: How to Refine Our Assessments of Party Novelty 3: Maps and Measures: What New Measures Can Tell Us About Central European Party Systems 4: The Old and the New: How Parties Differ with Age and Time 5: The Living and the Dead: Why Some Parties Fail and Others Survive 6: Cycles and Subsystems: Why New Parties Give Way to Even Newer Parties 7: Slovenia is Everywhere?: How the New Party Challenge Has Extended Across the Globe 8: Neither Older nor Wiser? What Continual Party Change Means for the Quality of Democracy

About the Author :
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.

Review :
Kevin Deegan Krause and Tim Haughton marshal an impressive collection of data from 1989 onward in post-communist European countries. [In their] systematic and meticulous analysis, the authors argue that much as with human lives, party births and deaths are intimately connected .[Their] fascinating analysis answers important questions. The New Party Challenge makes a valuable contribution to the field of electoral politics and will be of interest to Central European area specialists for its remarkable depth of empirical detail and to comparative scholars for its thought-provoking insights into the mechanisms behind party system stability and change With their mastery of qualitative and quantitative methods, Haughton and Deegan-Krause have written an excellent book for area specialists as well as for scholars of party politics ...the volume is an excellent piece of empirical work, with a strong base in existing research and theory. It is a valuable reminder of how political science can transcend simple or fashionable explanations and study our world from different angles. In this important book, Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause address a puzzle regarding volatility in the supply of and demand for political parties in Central Europe - why do so many parties fail but a few succeed? They address their puzzle in an appropriately complex way but in a lively style that makes for enjoyable as well as convincing reading. The book should not only be required reading for all scholars and students of post-Communist politics but for studies of parties and party systems in many other regions of the globe. The New Party Challenge provides a deeply original insight into the birth and death of political parties. Deegan-Krause and Haughton use their comprehensive examination of party politics across Central Europe during the decades since the end of communism as a mould for understanding how agency, timing, and structure interact to shape the fate of political parties. This book is comparative politics at its finest and has the making of a classic.