Economic, social and political crises cause mainstream parties to lose their electoral support, paving the way for new parties and political movements. However, new parties are not always genuinely new, sometimes they are merger or split parties or for other reasons may be considered a continuation of previously existing parties. The question is therefore what constitutes a new party? Is it a new name, structure, election participation for the first time or merely competing on new issue? Newness is usually not a dichotomous variable, parties are not just new or old, they are new to some extent or in some areas, hence multi-dimensional analyses are required in order to assess party novelty. Shlomit Barnea and Gideon Rahat (2011) have pointed out that newness can occur in three key areas: party in the electorate, party as organisation and party in government. However, in each area it is still deemed as a dichotomous variable. We know the area in which a party is new, but not to what extent. In turn, the concept of Allan Sikk and Philipp Köker (2019) introduces the interval scale of party novelty that enables one to assess the level of newness, however, they have limited their framework to some areas of party activity omitting, for example, party programmatic stances. This paper constitutes an overview and is of a conceptual nature. After a brief outline of current ideas,

a new analytical framework will be discussed that draws from the existing concepts but aims both to cover three areas of party activity and to assess the level of party newness in each of them.