Cummulative Party System Innovation

QoG code: psi_cpsi1

Cumulative Party System Innovation: sum of the vote share received by non-founder parties in each election. A party is considered as a founder if it has received at least 1% of the national vote share in at least one of the first two post-WWII elections (or, in the case of Greece, Portugal and Spain, the first two democratic elections). Otherwise, the party is counted as a non-founder. The rationale behind this choice is that we look at the first two post-WWII or post-authoritarian elections and make a dichotomous distinction between relevant parties that formed the system (those who received more than 1% of the votes) and parties that emerged later or were only marginal actors (those below 1%) at that time.

Type of variable
Continuous
Downloaded by QoG on
2025-10-02
Last updated by source
2024-07-08
Details of this variable in our compilation datasets
Dataset No. Countries
Standard cross-section 20
Standard time-series 20
Dataset Available for years
Standard time-series 1946-2024

Country coverage

Click here to see the full list of countries
  • Austria
  • Belgium
  • Cyprus (1975-)
  • Denmark
  • Finland
  • France (1963-)
  • Germany
  • Greece
  • Iceland
  • Ireland
  • Italy
  • Luxembourg
  • Malta
  • Netherlands
  • Norway
  • Portugal
  • Spain
  • Sweden
  • Switzerland
  • United Kingdom

Year coverage

This variable has information from 1946 to 2024.