Transhumanist Parties as Niche Parties

Abstract

Political parties advocating transhumanist ideas have recently sprung up in a great number of countries, supported by rapid technological and scientific progress. This article examines whether any of the various frameworks of niche party theory can adequately describe transhumanist parties. It is discussed how the nicheness of transhumanist parties can be conceptualized. After determining the common set of issues that ideologically diverse transhumanist political organizations accentuate, this article conducts a qualitative analysis to justify the “proto-nicheness” of transhumanist parties within the spatial and salience theories. Two new accounts will be put forward based on Bischof’s consumer market analogy and Hughes’s three-dimensional conceptualization of contemporary politics.