What accounts for variation in the electoral success of niche parties? Although institutional and sociological explanations of single-issue party strength have been dominant, they tend to remove parties from the analysis. In this article, I argue that the behavior of mainstream parties influences the electoral fortunes of the new, niche party actors. In contrast to standard spatial theories, my theory recognizes that party tactics work by altering the salience and ownership of issues for political competition, not just party issue positions. It follows that niche party support can be shaped by both proximal and non-proximal competitors. Analysis of green and radical right party vote in 17 Western European countries from 1970 to 2000 confirms that mainstream party strategies matter; the modified spatial theory accounts for the failure and success of niche parties across countries and over time better than institutional, sociological, and even standard spatial explanations.

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Why do some political parties flourish, while others flounder? In this book, Meguid examines variation in the electoral trajectories of the new set of single-issue parties: green, radical right, and ethnoterritorial parties. Instead of being dictated by electoral institutions or the socioeconomic climate, as the dominant theories contend, the fortunes of these niche parties, she argues, are shaped by the strategic responses of mainstream parties. She advances a theory of party competition in which mainstream parties facing unequal competitors have access to a wider and more effective set of strategies than posited by standard spatial models. Combining statistical analyses with in-depth case studies from Western Europe, the book explores how and why established parties undermine niche parties or turn them into weapons against their mainstream party opponents. This study of competition between unequals thus provides broader insights into the nature and outcome of competition between political equals.

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The process of decentralization has attracted significant scholarly attention over the past decade. With countries from around the globe transferring administrative, political, and fiscal competencies to subnational governments, social scientists have explored the effect of these reforms on outcomes ranging from macroeconomic performance, corruption, and political participation to ethnic conflict. 1 Far less is known, however, about the effects of decentralization on the electoral fortunes of political parties. Theories about the strategic adoption of decentralization provide some insights, 2 but no study has examined whether governing parties are rewarded or punished for their adoption of decentralization reforms. More research has been conducted on other political actors, 3 but it still remains unclear how changes in decentralization affect the performance of ethnoterritorial parties at both the newly weakened national level and the newly strengthened subnational level. 4 This paper aims to fill these gaps. Using an original dataset of multi-level electoral results across the subnational regions of eleven Western European countries from 1970 to 2006, I examine the effects of changes in the level of decentralization on the vote shares of supporters of decentralization: the governing parties adopting the reforms and the ethnoterritorial parties demanding them. Consistent with the logic of decentralization as appeasement and the resulting vote switching of pro-decentralization supporters, I find that governing parties enacting significant decentralization programs gain voters in national elections while ethnoterritorial parties lose voters. Token decentralization, on the other hand, fails to appease pro-decentralization voters. Under these circumstances, mainstream parties lose support. In subnational elections, the analyses reveal that strong decentralization causes ethnoterritorial parties to gain voters relative to pre-reform national election vote shares. Extensive decentralization reforms have no statistically significant effect on governing party vote shares in the subnational elections. This set of findings reveals that the electoral effect of decentralization is more nuanced than previous literature implies; its impact on vote share depends on both