The Social Bases of Political Parties: A New Measure and Survey

Marks, Gary; Attewell, David; Hooghe, Liesbet; Rovný, Jan; Steenbergen, Marco R.

doi:10.1017/s0007123421000740

Cited by 18 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 42 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Research on affective polarization also needs to engage more with the established literature on cleavages, identities and group conflict in Europe, which has recently experienced a revival of academic interest (Zollinger, 2024). Related work by Bornschier et al (2021) highlights that objective characteristics relate to social identities, often culturally connoted, and that these identities can then be politicized (see also Marks et al, 2023). Bradley and Chauchard (2022) show that countries with deeper ethnic divisions also have higher levels of affective polarization.…”

Section: We Need Appropriate Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective polarization in Europe

Wagner

2024

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Affective polarization, a concept that originated in the USA, has increasingly been studied in Europe’s multi-party systems. This form of polarization refers to the extent to which party supporters dislike one another – or, more technically, to the difference between the positive feelings towards the supporters of one’s own political party and the negative feelings towards the supporters of other parties. Measuring this gap in Europe’s multi-party systems requires researchers to make various important decisions relating to conceptualization and measurement. Often, our focus could instead lie on assessing partisan hostility or negative party affect, which is easier to measure. While recent research on affective polarization in Europe has already taught USA lot, both about affective polarization and about political conflict in Europe, I nevertheless suggest that research in this field faces four challenges, namely developing better measures, more sophisticated theories, clearer accounts of affective polarization’s importance and successful ways of reducing negative party affect, if this is indeed desirable.

show abstract

Section: We Need Appropriate Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective polarization in Europe

Wagner

2024

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A growing literature documents a fundamental shift in the determinants of vote choice and the social basis of voting. Stubager (2010Stubager ( , 2013 was one of the first to establish the increased importance of educational background for vote choice, which appears particularly consequential for distinguishing GAL and TAN electorates (Marks et al, 2022;Oesch & Rennwald, 2018). Other studies focus on shifting issues and issue dimensions.…”

Section: The Emergence Of the Transnational Cleavagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These conditions appear to be present in the case of the transnational cleavage. There is evidence that electoral support for GAL and TAN parties comes from different social groups (Marks et al., 2022), that these groups develop a group‐consciousness that matches this structural division (Bornschier et al., 2021) and that the cleavage is gaining an organizational basis (Sass & Kuhnle, 2022).…”

Section: The Emergence Of the Transnational Cleavagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The presence of a cleavage implies an opposition, with parties representing clearly articulated alternatives. Most research that has studied the emergence and importance of the new cleavage for explaining party system change focuses on the social bases of party support (e.g., Bornschier et al., 2021; Marks et al., 2022) or assesses the weight of different kinds of issues for vote choice (e.g., De Vries, 2018). Here we extend a spatial approach to the rise of a new cleavage and assess how voters view opposition between parties.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Transformation of the political space: A citizens’ perspective

Dassonneville

Hooghe

Marks

2023

European J Political Res

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A large and growing body of research draws attention to the rising salience of socio‐cultural and identitarian issues and, potentially, the emergence of a new political cleavage that divides voters on those issues. However, the micro‐foundations of this transformation are less well understood. Here we take a voter‐perspective to evaluate how party competition has been restructured in the eyes of the voter. We leverage measures of citizens’ self‐reported probabilities to vote for alternative political parties in the European Election Study voter surveys between 1999 and 2019 in order to map electoral affinity and opposition among party families. We estimate to what extent spatial location on the economic left–right dimension and the GAL‐TAN dimension explain the patterns that emerge, and how this has changed over time. Our results provide evidence of a substantial shift in voter assessment from party competition structured along the economic left–right dimension to competition structured along the GAL‐TAN dimension. We also find great separation of TAN parties from other parties, with the deepest antipathy between the TAN parties and greens.

show abstract

“…Today, however, these cleavages have largely lost their hold (Marks et al, 2022). The social bases of social democratic and Christian democratic parties have become more heterogenous and the predictive power of class and religion has declined (Gomez, 2022; Oesch and Rennwald, 2018).…”

Section: Variation and Determinants Of Issue Salience Divergencementioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping issue salience divergence in Europe from 1945 to the present

Gunderson

2023

Party Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Issue salience is a fundamental component of party competition, yet we know little about when, where, or why parties’ issue emphases converge or diverge. I propose an original operationalization of issue salience divergence, the extent to which parties’ issue emphases differ from each other in an election, that generates values at the party-election and country-election levels. I leverage data from party manifestos to calculate scores for 2,308 party-election combinations of 381 unique parties in 426 elections across thirty European countries, the most comprehensive dataset to date. I find that issue salience divergence is generally low and has starkly decreased over time, but countries and parties differ substantially. As an initial step in understanding these differences, I propose and test initial expectations of how party and democracy age, electoral systems, and party type alter the incentives for divergent issue salience.

show abstract

The Social Bases of Political Parties: A New Measure and Survey

Cited by 18 publications

References 42 publications

Affective polarization in Europe

Affective polarization in Europe

Transformation of the political space: A citizens’ perspective

Mapping issue salience divergence in Europe from 1945 to the present

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About