Position, Salience, and Ownership Theory and the Pirates: The Rise and Fall of an Atypical Party

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Greenstein, Claire
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Political Science

Abstract

Even if niche parties are not in government, they still affect politics, making it important to understand what causes niche parties to succeed or fail. Bonnie Meguid (2007) created Position, Salience, and Ownership theory (PSO) to argue that the fate of Western European niche parties depends mainly on the strategic combinations that mainstream parties employ against niche parties. In this thesis, I test Meguid's theory on the Swedish and German Pirate Parties. I find that the Swedish Pirates largely conform to PSO theory, but I argue that the German Pirates' fortunes are better explained by the party's organization. This thesis makes two main contributions: it tests Meguid's theory on two parties whose fortunes could not have informed the theory, and it adds to the literature that looks to party organization to explain party trajectories by introducing the idea that some parties contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction.

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