Too Small to Fail? Persistence and protest among small party supporters in Germany and New Zealand

Abstract

Over the last two decades, party systems across advanced industrial democracies have experienced a general fragmentation. A consequence of this in many countries is an increasing vote share going to very small parties that fail to win any seats. We know little about these parties, or their supporters, given their relative scarcity. In this paper, we argue that understanding their motivations and behaviors is increasingly important given the continued fragmentation of party systems. We utilize a combination of survey data and electoral data from New Zealand and Germany to show that supporters of very small parties can be distinguished from supporters of other political parties that win seats. These countries, which utilize mixed-member electoral systems, allow us to both observe small party supporter behavior, and observe how these voters behave when they are not given the choice to vote for their preferred party in single-member contests. We argue that the differences in observable and self-reported behavior are largely a reflection of protest-motivated voting: because these voters feel a certain sense of dissatisfaction with the current system and its party choices, they are more likely to cast their votes for any protest party rather than make a more strategic choice and vote for a less-preferred systemic alternative. This, we believe, has important implications for our understanding of how voters behave when existing party systems lose legitimacy.