The Structure of Political Competition in Western Europe

Zsolt Enyedi,Kevin Deegan-Krause

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317990475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is European party politics hovering above society? Why do voters pick one party over others? Is it a question of class? Of religion? Of attitudes about taxes or immigration or global warming? Or is it something else entirely? The Structure of Political Competition in Western Europe takes a detailed look at the ways in which Western Europe's party systems are anchored in social and ideological structures. The book's first section focuses on the role of social structures - particularly education, class and religion - and analyzes the complex interplay among these factors. The second section addresses the ways that the sociological structures such as class and religion interact with voters' values. The third section examines the way that these structures and values shape the space of political competition among parties. The conclusion integrates the findings of the empirical articles, putting them into broader comparative perspective, discussing whether relatively predictable structures have been overwhelmed by media-driven spectacles, political personalities and focus on short-term economic performance.

This volume will appeal to scholars and graduate students in Europe and those from North America, Asia and other regions who study European politics, political parties, cleavages and political behaviour.

This book was published as a special issue of West European Politics.

The New Cultural Divide and the Two-Dimensional Political Space in Western Europe

Simon Bornschier

While the endorsement of universalistic values by the New Left led to a first transformation of political space in Western Europe, the counter-mobilisation of the extreme populist right resulted in a second transformation in the 1990s. This article focuses on the discursive innovations and normative foundations that have driven the emergence of a conflict opposing libertarian-universalistic and traditionalist-communitarian values. An analysis using data from the media coverage of election campaigns confirms that the New Left and the populist right represent polar normative ideals in France, Austria, and Switzerland. A similar transformation of political space occurred in the absence of a right-wing populist party in Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands. In these contexts, the author hypothesises the value conflict to prove less durable and polarising in the longer run. The analysis of an election in the mid 2000s confirms that party systems evolve in a path dependent manner in the two contexts.

In the past decades, new cultural conflicts have become vastly prominent in West European politics. While the New Social Movements of the left first advocated universalistic values in the late 1960s, a New Right counter-movement gained momentum some two decades later. First resulting in the fading of established partisan loyalties, these new conflicts have been represented by political parties. In this article, I focus on the programmatic innovations of parties and the consequent reshaping of the conflicts represented by party systems at the turn of the century. Furthermore, I assess how durable conflicts centring on cultural liberalism, immigration policies, and European integration are likely to be. In this respect, persisting differences in the nature of conflicts in different countries are to be expected as a result of the way cultural conflicts transformed party systems early on.

The theoretical part of this article provides an account of how New Left and New Right parties have driven the emergence of a new value conflict. The first transformation, which took place in the 1970s, involved the emergence of an opposition between culturally libertarian and traditionalist or authoritarian values. In a second transformation, this conflict has come to centre more explicitly on differing conceptions of community. In normative terms, I argue that libertarian-universalistic and traditionalist-communitarian values form opposing normative ideals and conceptions of justice. Empirically, these two conceptions come to lie at opposing poles of a new dimension of political conflict in West European party systems in the 1990s. With reference to the non-economic content of this dimension, I will refer to it as the new cultural divide. With the traditional distributional conflict well and alive, this results in a two-dimensional competitive space. In France, Switzerland, and Austria, extreme right-wing populist parties have triggered the manifestation of the new cultural divide, while it has emerged as a result of the strategic moves of the established parties in Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands. Whether or not a right-wing populist party was able to entrench itself in the crucial phase of the late 1980s or early 1990s has important implications for the durability and for the virulence of the new cultural conflict, however.

These claims are empirically verified in an analysis of the dimensionality of political space in the 1970s, the 1990s, and the first years of the new millennium. This inquiry relies on data on party positions derived from the news coverage of election campaigns. This article extends earlier analyses (Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008) to a more recent election in each of the six countries, and allows parties and issues to be located in the political space by means of Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). Using this data, I investigate how the dimensions underlying political competition have evolved between the 1970s and the mid 2000s. This allows me to assess, first, how resilient the cultural conflicts will prove, and second, to verify the frequent claim that they are likely to be integrated into the traditional left–right dimension.

The article is structured as follows. After a brief discussion of the forces underlying recent evolutions in West European party systems, I focus on the ideologies that parties have used to mobilise the new cultural conflict. Section two develops hypotheses on how the new conflicts are likely to manifest themselves in the transformation of political space, depending on the context of the national party system. I then present the research design and the data used in the empirical analysis, the results of which are presented in the final section. The analysis will allow an over-time tracking of the two-fold transformation of political space. Given the postulated divergence between party systems in the 2000s, and because this data has hitherto not been analysed, I will put special emphasis on the patterns of opposition in the most recent contest.

The New Cultural Conflict in Western Europe

There is some disagreement regarding the sources of the recent transformations of West European party systems. As pointed out by Enyedi and Deegan-Krause in the introduction to this volume, parallel to the de-alignment of traditional class and religious cleavages, there are also processes of re-alignment that are driven by new structural antagonisms. As pointed out by Allardt (1968) early on, the educational revolution of the 1960s has spurred a growing diffusion of universalistic outlooks that citizens with more traditionalist values and conceptions of community are likely to see as threatening. On the other hand, Kriesi et al. (2006, 2008) argue that the educational revolution interacts with processes of denationalisation or globalisation to create ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of the modernisation processes of recent decades (on these two views see also Dolezal 2010 and Stubager 2010).

One may debate the relative contribution of economic modernisation, spurred by globalisation, and cultural modernisation since the late 1960s in party system change. As a result of these evolutions certain social groups have lost in terms of life-chances or privileges, while others feel threatened in their identity by the policies enacting universalistic values and by European integration. One of the most striking outcomes of these large-scale changes has been that the resulting political potentials have at least until recently not been mobilised in economic terms. Rather, they have been tied to cultural conflicts that emerged in the aftermath of 1968. In this contribution, I leave the evolving structural underpinnings of party choices in Western Europe aside for the moment. Instead, I focus on the political conflicts themselves that have triggered these processes of de-alignment and realignment. If cleavages involve social structural groups with shared identities that allow them to act collectively, as defined by Bartolini and Mair (1990), then ideologies are likely to play a dual role from a cleavage perspective. On the one hand, conflict along established divisions keeps alive existing collective identities and thereby perpetuates alignments between social groups and parties. Novel ideologies, on the other hand, are crucial in the political articulation of new potentials rooted in an evolving social structure. Common social structural positions are unlikely to result in collective identifications as a matter of course. Instead, the latter are to some degree shaped from above by political actors that seek to establish durable links between themselves and segments of society (Bornschier 2010).

In the late 1960s and 1970s, new political issues came up that had more to do with values and life-styles than with traditional, distributional conflicts. The mobilisation of the New Social Movements of the 1960s and 1970s – fighting, for example, for feminist and gay rights, for the right to abortion and for the recognition of minorities and alternative life-styles – brought these new issues onto the political agenda, resulting in a two-dimensional structure in West European party systems, as Kitschelt (1994) has shown. Cutting across the ‘old’ distributional axis, a cultural line of conflict with opposing libertarian and authoritarian values had come to structure the attitudes of voters. On the political left, the prominence of cultural liberalism has given rise to the establishment of Ecologist parties and a transformation of a number of Social Democratic parties early on in the 1980s.

An opposing set of norms and values that constituted a counter-potential to the libertarian movements was detectable at the attitudinal level early on in Western publics (Sacchi 1998). Its political manifestation, however, was delayed as compared to that of the New Left. The discomfort with the cultural changes brought about by the New Left was essentially conservative, and ideologically diffuse (see also Flanagan and Lee 2003). Consequently, the political manifestation of the anti-universalistic potential was less the result of a grass-roots mobilisation in social movements, as had been the case for the New Left, but depended more heavily on political leadership. In particular, political actors had to find specific issues around which a common identity could be established and that could serve to mobilise the traditionalist potential. In the 1990s, right-wing populist parties in a number of European countries succeeded in putting themes on the political agenda that disrupted older collective identities based on class and religion. This is important since the mobilisation space of new conflicts is conditioned by the political identities tied to the established cleavages (Bornschier 2010). As a consequence, and despite their diverse origins, right-wing populist parties have converged on a programmatic profile that involves two elements. First, they challenge the societal changes brought about by the libertarian left, and question the legitimacy of political decisions that enact universalistic values. Second, and more importantly, the populist right has promoted new issues and developed new discourses, for example concerning immigration. This does not involve ethnic racism, but rather what Betz (2004) and Betz and Johnson (2004) have called ‘differentialist nativism’ or ‘cultural differentialism’, which represents a counter-vision to multicultural models of society.

The early literature emphasised the diversity of ideological appeals of parties of the extreme right (e.g. Kitschelt and McGann 1995), and while some of these differences can be shown to persist (e.g. Golder 2003; Carter 2005; Cole 2005; Mudde 2007), the successful exponents of this group have converged on the programmatic profile outlined above. By virtue of their specific programmatic profile, as well a number of further attributes, extreme right-wing populist parties represent a common party family that forms an ideologically more moderate sub-group of the broader extreme right category (Bornschier 2010).¹ While the New Left has triggered a first transformation of political space in the 1970s and 1980s, the mobilisation of the populist right has thus been the driving force of a second transformation. Depending on the country, the latter took place either in the late 1980s or in the 1990s, as the analysis will show (see also Kriesi et al. 2006).

As a result, the issues advocated by the New Left and the populist right now lie at opposing poles of a new line of conflict that I propose to label libertarian-universalistic vs. traditionalist-communitarian.² This opposition is, at heart, a conflict over the role of community. It is at the centre of the well-known philosophical debate between liberals and communitarians, opposing individualist and communitarian conceptions of the person. As communitarians such as Walzer (1983) and Taylor (1992) argue, universalistic principles may violate cultural traditions within an established community. If humans are inherently social beings, the application of universalistic principles may lead to political solutions that clash with established and widely shared cultural practices. Communitarians urge us to acknowledge the fact that our identities are grounded in cultural traditions, and that an individualistic conception of the self is misconceived.

Although many communitarian thinkers only propose a (more or less modest) communitarian corrective to liberal universalism, this debate has provided theoretical grounds for a more far-reaching critique of the universalistic principles advocated by Rawls (1971). Philosophical currents of the European New Right have borrowed from communitarian conceptions of community and justice in their propagation of the concept of ‘cultural differentialism’, claiming not the superiority of any nationality or race, but instead stressing the right of peoples to preserve their distinctive traditions. In turn, this discourse has proved highly influential for right-wing populist parties (Antonio 2000; Minkenberg 2000; Birnbaum 1996). Immigration is directly linked to this conception since the inflow of people from other cultural backgrounds endangers the cultural homogeneity that thinkers of the New Right, as well as exponents of right-wing populist parties deem necessary to preserve. Equally present in communitarian thinking and in the discourse of the populist right is a defence of the primacy of democratic majority decisions over abstract normative principles. From a theoretical point of view, then, New Left and New Right positions represent polar normative ideals.³ Empirically, I therefore expect the defence of cultural tradition and the rejection of multicultural society to form one pole of the new cultural divide in political space, while cultural liberalism and universalistic conceptions of community constitute the opposing pole.

The Advent of a Two-Dimensional Political Space: Hypotheses

Many European countries have been stamped by more than just the state– market cleavage, most notably the religious cleavage that has represented the second common structuring element of European party systems. Consequently, political space in multiparty systems may well have been two-dimensional already before the New Left transformation of social democratic parties. Flanagan and Lee (2003) explicitly relate today’s ‘culture wars’ to an opposition between religious and increasingly secular and individualistic worldviews. More than the advent of a fundamentally new dimension of conflict, then, we are likely to have witnessed a shift in the substantive content of the cultural or religious dimension, and of the relative salience of the economic and cultural divides. In the 1970s, where the empirical analysis will begin, I expect a situation in which the cultural issues put on the agenda by the New Left have resulted in a first re-structuring of political space, leading to a divide between libertarian and authoritarian or traditionalist values. As a consequence of the emergence of a communitarian conception of community opposed to the universalistic one, I expect this divide to have been transformed anew in the late 1980s and early 1990s, resulting in an opposition between libertarian-universalistic and traditionalist-communitarian values.

Although parties of the established right first put the issue of immigration on the political agenda in the 1980s, as pointed out by Ignazi (1992, 2003), only right-wing populist parties practice an elaborate traditionalistcommunitarian discourse that combines opposition against universalistic values with an exclusionist conception of community. Consequently, while the immigration issue has been a prominent one in most of Western Europe in the 1990s, resulting in a commonality of the party political space (see Bornschier 2005 and Kriesi et al. 2006), I expect party systems with a significant right-wing populist party to follow a different trajectory in the 2000s than party systems where this has not been the case. The reason is that a firmly entrenched right-wing populist party can keep questions of community and tradition on the political agenda, while they may lose in importance otherwise. Where the established parties were able to avert the entry of a party of the populist right, economic issues may thus make a comeback, partly due to unpopular reforms of the welfare state pursued by left-wing parties in government. A position of economic protectionism seems to convey considerable potential for parties of the left-wing mainstream. Apart from Germany, the recent success of the S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Abstracts
• Introduction
• 1. The New Cultural Divide and the Two-Dimensional Political Space in Western Europe
• 2. Elite-Level Conflict Salience and Dimensionality in Western Europe: Concepts and Empirical Findings
• 3. Political Cleavages and Socio-economic Context: How Welfare Regimes and Historical Divisions Shape Political Cleavages
• 4. The Development of the Education Cleavage: Denmark as a Critical Case
• 5. Exploring the Stabilization of a Political Force: The Social and Attitudinal Basis of Green Parties in the Age of Globalization
• 6. The Regional Cleavage in Western Europe: Can Social Composition, Value Orientations and Territorial Identities Explain the Impact of Region on Party Choice?
• 7. Structural and Ideological Voting in Age Cohorts
• 8. Persistent Political Divides, Electoral Volatility and Citizen Involvement: The Freezing Hypothesis in the 2004 European Election
• 9. Models, Measures and Mechanisms: An Agenda for Progress in Cleavage Research
• 10. Cleavage Research: A Critical Appraisal
• 11. The Comparative Analysis of Electoral and Partisan Politics
• 12. Restructuration of Partisan Politics and the Emergence of a New Cleavage Based on Values
• 13. Agency and the Structure of Party Competition: Alignment, Stability and the Role of Political Elites
• Index