Altering Party Systems: Strategic Behavior and the Emergence of New Political Parties in Western Democracies. By Simon Hug. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 216p. $47.50

Extract

The questions of when and why new political parties decide to form and contest elections in established democracies are not new, but they have grown in importance over the last two decades. The rise of postmaterialist and nationalist parties across Western Europe has led to an increased focus on the causal factors involved in the formation and electoral success of new parties. In this new book, Simon Hug attempts to move beyond existing studies to create generalizable hypotheses capable of predicting when we should expect these phenomena to occur. It is innovative both in terms of its approach, which is explicitly game-theoretic, and in its goal to move toward a truly generalizable theory of new party formation (and, to some degree, success). Although there are some theoretical as well as empirical weaknesses in the work, Hug has made a laudable effort in his attempts to move the analysis of new party development beyond the bulk of existing descriptive case or class studies.