The mid and late 2000s witnessed a proliferation of political parties in European party systems. Marxist, Libertarian, Pirate, and Animal parties, as well as radical-right and populist parties, have become part of an increasingly heterogeneous political spectrum generally dominated by the mainstream centre-left and centre-right. The question this article explores is what led to the surge of these parties during the first decade of the 21st century. While it is tempting to look at structural arguments or the recent late-2000s financial crisis to explain this proliferation, the emergence of these parties predates the debt-crisis and can not be described by structural shifts alone . This paper argues that the proliferation of new radical parties came about not only as a result of changes in the political space, but rather due to the very perceived presence and even strengthening of what Katz and Mair (1995) famously dubbed the "cartelization" of mainstream political parties.
Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v7i1.210