Party System Innovation (overall vote share of new parties in given election)

QoG code: psi_psi1

Party System Innovation: overall vote share of new parties in a given election. It is calculated at time t with respect to time t-1 (namely, PSInn is calculated with respect to the status quo established at the previous election) and therefore each observation in each country is completely independent from the previous ones. In order to exclude marginal parties, the author has set a threshold at 1% of the national share for a given party to be considered as part of the party system in a given election and has collected data starting from the third post-World War II or democratic election of each country, for a total of 209 new parties (see the complete list of new parties below) in 327 elections. The underlying assumption is that the party system innovation they are interested in is that occurring after the initial institutionalization of the party system. According to PSInn, a party is considered 'new' only in the first election when it enters the party system by receiving at least 1% of the national share. Then, in the subsequent elections, it becomes 'old'.

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.