Margit Tavits, "Party System Change: Testing a Model of New Party Entry," Party Politics, 12 (January, 2006), 99-119.

First Paragraph:
Why do new parties emerge even in well-established party systems? Revealing the conditions for new party emergence is a key to understanding party system change and stability in general. Although most of the new parties that emerge in established democracies are small, some are not. Even if a new party poses no threat of replacing an established one, its presence will have an impact on electoral competition by driving votes away from existing parties, thus destabilizing the electoral arena. Furthermore, discovering what determines new party emergence in stable systems may give important hints to new democracies that still face the challenge of stabilizing their party systems and establishing long-term patterns of representation.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1. Number of new parties per election per country
Table 2. Descriptive statistics
Table 3. Negative binomial regressions of the emergence of new parties
Figure 1. Effect of the duration of democracy on the number of new parties conditional on the level of integration
Figure 2. Effect of integration on the number of new parties conditional on the level of the duration of democracy

First Paragraph of Conclusion:
The findings in this article show that the emergence of new parties is associated with the cost of registering a party, the availability of public funding, the permissiveness of the electoral institutions (i.e. costs of entry), the level of corporatism (the benefits from electoral office), the duration of democracy and the number of signatures required for party formation petition (the probability of electoral support). Furthermore, the analysis supports the argument about the interactive influence of the benefits from office and the probability of getting elected on the entry calculations. Thus, the study provides general support for the theory of strategic entry.