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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces. AbstractUsing qualitative comparative analysis, we examine why left-libertarian parties, associated with environmental and other "new social movements," have been relatively successful in some western democracies but not others. We conceptualize the parties as products of new citizen demands on the one hand, and ofpolitical opportunity structures, which govern party supply, on the other. We show that supply-side factors, such as a strong left and the existence ofproportional representation, tend to work together to facilitate party innovation. A strong left appears more likely to downplay left-libertarian issues and push new-left activists to form separate parties, while proportional representation eases entry into the party system. Demand-side factors play a significant but lesser role. The theoretical and methodological strategies employed here have the potential to help political sociologists explain the variable success of other types ofparty innovators. Historically, waves or cycles of protest movements have led to the incorporation of various groups into democratizing regimes and generated changes in the notionof democracy itself (Markoff 1996). A number of scholars have suggested that we are at the beginning of a new redefinition of democracy and of another transformation, or at least realignment, of party systems in modern industrialized democracies (Dalton 1988; Inglehart 1990; Kitschelt 1993; Offe 1985).

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