Electoral competition in Europe's new tripolar political space: Class voting for the left, centre‐right and radical right

Abstract

The rise of the radical right fundamentally changes the face of electoral competition in Western Europe. Bipolar competition is becoming tripolar, as the two dominant party poles of the twentieth century – the left and the centre‐right – are challenged by a third pole of the radical right. Between 2000 and 2015, the radical right has secured more than 12 per cent of the vote in over ten Western European countries. This article shows how electoral competition between the three party poles plays out at the micro level of social classes. It presents a model of class voting that distinguishes between classes that are a party's preserve, classes that are contested strongholds of two parties and classes over which there is an open competition. Using seven rounds of the European Social Survey, it shows that sociocultural professionals form the party preserve of the left, and large employers and managers the preserve of the centre‐right. However, the radical right competes with the centre‐right for the votes of small business owners, and it challenges the left over its working‐class stronghold. These two contested strongholds attest to the co‐existence of old and new patterns of class voting. Old patterns are structured by an economic conflict: Production workers vote for the left and small business owners for the centre‐right based on their economic attitudes. In contrast, new patterns are linked to the rise of the radical right and structured by a cultural conflict.

Party choice in Europe: Social cleavages and the rise of populist parties

“…Finally, as we might expect, these ideational variables do somewhat better in differentiating party supporters than the religious, class, or economic assessment factors: 43.4% of the cases are correctly classified. Thus, we find support for findings that culture weighs more heavily than material assessments when explaining support for populist parties (Oesch, 2008;Oesch and Rennwald, 2018).…”

“…Populists of left and right are the left-behind, less educated, lower class economic pessimists who see government elites at home and in Brussels as disconnected and untrustworthy. The model clearly demonstrates that class still matters in European party politics, but it not only (weakly) divides the traditional center along familiar lines but also unites the populists of the left and right against the nonpopulist traditional parties (confirming Oesch and Rennwald, 2018). We also see from our model that culture matters.…”

“…Caramani (2006Caramani ( , 2011, in an analysis of 264 national legislative elections, demonstrates the continued strength of the left-right dimension, despite the rise of populist parties, finding little evidence for a Europe-wide transnationalist-nationalist cleavage. Caramani's first claim finds widespread support in the literature: the traditional leftright spit persists in European society (Kriesi, 2010;Oesch and Rennwald, 2018;Stoll, 2010;Tó ka and Gosselin, 2010). But the second-that there is little evidence for a new cleavage-is contradicted by numerous studies that describe the new divide using a variety of terms: post-materialist/materialist (Inglehart, 1977), libertarian/authoritarian (Kitschelt, 1995), Green-alternative-libertarian versus traditional-authoritarian-nationalist (GAL/TAN, Hooghe et al, 2002), educated/less educated (Stubager, 2010), libertarian-universalistic/traditionalist-communitarian (Bornschier, 2010), and left libertarian/right populist (Hutter, 2014).…”

“…Another frequent theme is that Right-Wing Populist and Populist Left parties (and some others) channel discontent with globalization and with the political elites who have fostered it, producing distrust of the EU, with its supranational authority, and disgust with national regimes. In addition, others have seen cultural traditionalism motivating dissenters from the mainstream parties on the populist right and cultural liberalism elevating the prospects of Greens and, perhaps, the Populist Left (for a summary of new cleavage perspectives, see Bornschier, 2010;Kriesi, 2010;Norris and Inglehart, 2019;Oesch and Rennwald, 2018). To test these propositions, we included several measures tapping each theory: selfplacement on a left-right scale, attitudes toward the EU (based on a 10-item factor score), approval of the national government, opposition to gay marriage, a preference for economic priorities over environmental ones, support for economic redistribution, a desire to restrict immigration, and finally, willingness to restrict personal privacy to preserve public safety.…”

The Role of Political Activity in the Formation of Online Identity Bubbles

“…The rise of populism is probably the most visible sign of this change (Inglehart & Norris, ). In contemporary multiparty systems, parties can no longer be defined only according to their placement on the left–right spectrum (Oesch & Rennwald, ); rather, political parties need to be considered in association with multiple value‐dimensional factors (Kriesi, ). Social media is an appropriate tool for new political movements to spread their ideologies and to share their goals with broader audiences (Engesser, Ernst, Esser, & Büchel, ; Kruikemeier, van Noort, Vliegenthart, & de Vreese, ).…”