Abstract
The first elections following a transition to democratic rule have tremendous potential to affect the development new party systems. However, the evolution of new party systems is poorly understood, perhaps because it is widely assumed that several elections are needed before a durable party structure takes shape. I assess two competing expectations about party system fragmentation and volatility. Two results stand out in this analysis: first, while the data exhibit a modest trend toward increased party fragmentation following founding elections, the effective number of electoral parties and support for minor parties is more stable across the first four elections than existing theory allows. Second, the greatest change in early elections is the loss of electoral support for the party that captures the most votes in the founding election; these parties tends to lose statistically significant electoral support in each of the next three elections. Overall, the results argue against a unilinear trend in new party systems. Indeed, a cluster analysis suggests four distinct party system patterns within the dataset.
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