Reasons political parties lose their representatives. Combining party death and party failure

Getting representatives elected is a key feature of political parties. In this articlewe explore the reasons why once successful parties fail to do so. We propose tobetter distinguish between the concepts of party failure and party death, and tocombine both in one theoretical model, leading to five subcategories of whyparties stop having representatives elected. We then use our model to analyse129 Dutch local parties from the 2014 to the 2022 elections, using several datasources, including election results, party websites and media reports. Ouranalysis shows that merging with other parties is the most important reasonfor losing all representatives (merger death), followed by ending their organisa-tion (dissolution death) and not having any representatives elected (electoralfailure). We conclude that the model provides a comprehensive view of the finalphase of the party lifespan and offers possibilities for further application in localand national politics.