Explaining Europe’s transformed electoral landscape: structure, salience, and agendas

Abstract

What has caused the marked, cross-national, and unprecedented trends in European electoral results in the 21st century? Scholarly explanations include social structure and challenger party entrepreneurship. We argue that these electoral changes more proximally result from public issue salience, which results from societal trends and mainly affects rather than is caused by party agenda setting. We use aggregate-level panel data across 28 European countries to show that the public issue salience of three issues—unemployment, immigration, and the environment—is associated with later variation in the results of the conservative, social democrat, liberal, radical right, radical left, and green party families in theoretically expected directions, while the party system issue agenda has weaker associations. Public issue salience, in turn, is rooted in societal trends (unemployment rates, immigration rates and temperature anomalies), and, in some cases, party agenda setting. We validate our mechanism at the individual-level across 28 European countries and using UK panel data. Our findings have implications for our understanding of the agency of parties, the permanency of recent electoral changes, and how voters reconcile their social and political worlds.

No Conservative View Left

“…This conceptualization is in line with previous literature on belief constraint and partisan allegiances (Converse 2006;Levendusky 2010a;Slothuus and Vreese 2010;Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus 2013). The chosen approach does not consider the source of alignment, which could stem either from individuals adhering to party elites or from shifts in issue salience that lead partisans to realign their allegiances (Zaller 1992;Levendusky 2010b;Dennison and Kriesi 2023). Regardless of the causal direction, the sorting process may involve partisans adopting party ideology or altering their identity to resolve dissonance between personal and party ideologies.…”

“…The observational data, primarily allowing for cross-sectional comparisons, are not well-suited to differentiate between established theories of alignment. These theories include mechanisms such as elite cues (Hetherington 2001;Levendusky 2010a) or shifts in issue salience (Dennison and Kriesi 2023). Additionally, although the data cover a range of sociocultural policies (e.g., gender, immigration, morality), they omit some newer political issues that may be relevant, such as minority rights or freedom of speech.…”

“…For example, right-wing parties often oppose universalism, whereas left-wing parties usually advocate for redistribution (Kriesi and Schulte-Cloos 2020). Consequently, exogenous changes in the salience of these issues foster support for parties espousing related ideology (Dennison and Kriesi 2023). While circumstances change, those strongly attached to political parties might strive to follow their parties and adjust their beliefs (Adams, Green, and Milazzo 2012;Adams, De Vries, and Leiter 2012).…”

“…On the other hand, during the immigration crisis of 2015, the radical right capitalized on the heightened salience of immigration issues (Dennison and Kriesi 2023). This situation prompted a shift toward more restrictive immigration policies and welfare chauvinism (Elchardus and Spruyt 2012;Harris and Römer 2023).…”

Racial Threat in Public Social Spaces

“…This mechanism is particularly relevant in the context of immigration, where preferences tend to be highly stable over the life course (Kustov, Laaker and Reller 2021). Future research should pay equal attention to changes in issue preferences and salience, as the latter appears more malleable in adult voters and thus more likely to precipitate political changes over the short-and medium-term (Sears and Funk 1999;San Miguel, Ryan and Scott 2002;Prior 2010;Dennison and Kriesi 2023;Danieli et al 2022).…”