Recent years have seen the formation of new parties across Europe that challenge established patterns of party competition and coalition-building during elections. While a similar trend of party creation has occurred in Montenegro, these new parties have failed to „deinstitutionalise” the party system. This article tracks the development process for new parties. At the same time, it looks at factors and settings that have enabled (or impeded) the institutionalisation of these parties and their relative success in parliamentary elections. Two peculiar findings arise from my analysis. First, it appears that the fragmentation of the traditional party system has only happened among opposition parties (with the notable exception of a split among social democrats). This raises questions about the reasons for this process and its effect on party competition. It also leads to a second finding: though more than five effective political parties have been created since 2012, they have failed to change established party competition. To a limited degree, these parties have shifted the focus of public debate from identity politics to the economy, but the party system remains highly ientrenched. In other words, coalition-building is as predictable as ever.

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This paper explores differences in the party system development of two former Yugoslav republics: Slovenia and Montenegro. Despite sharing a communist institutional system, after that disintegrated Slovenia had a much faster pace of democratic consolidation and economic development than Montenegro. Similarly, the nature of the party competition and party system structure are also quite different. Using a quantitative and descriptive approach applied to the period between 1990 and 2018, we outline patterns of party competition and party system development and explore how they complement the stages of democratisation. We investigate how the comparatively faster democratisation in Slovenia is reflected in the competitive party system with a focus on the ideological divide as the chief source of electoral competition. In contrast, we look at how the prolonged transition in Montenegro is reflected in the closed party system with party competition occurring mainly along ethnic lines.

While we know a lot about the typical type of radical right-wing (RRWP) voter, individual religiosity in explaining support for RRWPs has eluded consistent scholarly attention. The mixed results available from the scarce literature find both positive and negative associations between religiosity and RRWPs vote. The variation in these relationships is puzzling, especially if we consider how RRWPs often present themselves as guardians of native ethnic and religious identity. In this paper we argue that religiosity increases the chance of voting for RRWPs when ethnic relations are a salient issue in the political system. We test our theory using multilevel regression modeling on the European Social Survey, specifically Rounds 7, 8 and 9 and replicate our results based on the European Values Study from 2017. We find that religiosity is a significant predictor of the RRWP vote when there are salient ethnic relations in the political system, proxied by the presence of an ethnic minority party. On the other hand, in countries without minority parties, non-religious individuals are more likely to vote for RRWPs.