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Category: Project

Description: The ‘Party families in Western Europe’ dataset was collected as part of the research project ‘Survival of the fittest. Party entry and exit in Western Europe, 1945-2015’ funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (grant number: FWO16/PDO/198) and the Fund for Scientific Research Wallonia ‘FNRS’ (Grant number: 28091302) conducted at Ghent University and the Université libre de Bruxelles. The project aimed at developing an understanding on the acts of party entry (regardless of electoral success) and continued participation in elections (again regardless of electoral success). Hence, to prevent selection bias, the project endeavoured to include any party that participated in any democratic post-WWII election in all these countries. As such, our database is the most ambitious effort thus far when it comes to the inclusion of smaller parties. Furthermore, we provide the most fine-grained classification of party families hitherto available where we distinguish between the 74 families further described below. The countries included are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.