New parties face special problems, beyond those of opposition parties in general. This has been important in Japan, where the leading opposition between 1993 and 2003 was made up of new parties.

As they develop, new parties often encounter many problems, even beyond their very newness. For example, in systems where new parties have little incentive to consolidate into larger wholes, they often have a hard time presenting a unified front against large existing parties. New parties in Clientelist/Financially Centralized systems face problems growing out of the way they were born. In such systems, new parties are likely to form from the top down. That is, after the party system is established, new parties have incentives to form not from the grassroots, but rather out of splits from and/or mergers between preexisting parties.

Aldrich's (1995) description of the early American Democratic Party suggests how new parties can benefit from such conditions. The presence of preexisting party organizations that new parties can borrow from can make creating new local organizations easier. However, in 1990s' Japan, new parties' top-down formation created difficulties for the opposition. In earlier chapters, I noted a number of ways in which top-down party formation patterns hurt the opposition in Japan, not the least of which being that it made the opposition more of an elite-level party with less of a grassroots base.