Transformation of the political space: A citizens’ perspective

Abstract

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.

Cleavage Theory Meets Gender Equality: Examining Party Positions in Germany

“…The liberal FDP emerges as a bridge between the GAL and TAN parties, learning towards the GAL on some issues, but towards the TAN on others. Thus, our study confirms previous findings (Bremer & Schulte-Cloos, 2019;Dassonneville et al, 2023;Siegel & Wang, 2018) that the GAL-TAN divide is increasingly structuring the current political party landscape in Germany, with the Greens and the AfD at either end of each pole, and that these findings can be extended to the gender equality policies in Germany.…”

“…Others suggest that the conflicts have sparked a political countermovement or cultural backlash (Norris & Inglehart, 2019), leading to the emergence of new nationalistic right-wing political parties such as Germany's AfD or Spain's Vox and strengthening the electorate of existing right populist parties, like Fratelli D'Italia or the Sweden Democrats. In short, these studies point to a politicization of the new cultural cleavage, as the GAL-TAN divide has increasingly restructured the political spectrum in many European countries (Borbáth et al, 2023;Dassonneville et al, 2023;Kriesi et al, 2012).…”

Variations in Social Europe? National political parties' positions on EU‐level social regulations

“…The unit of analysis is national parties. Following Dassonneville et al (2023), I excluded regionalist parties, agrarian/centre parties and parties whose family was unclassified. I also excluded parties, which were not EU Member States at the point of data collection.…”

“…Regarding the party-level explanatory variable, I used the CHES's categorisation of party families. Following Dassonneville et al (2023), I combined confessional parties together with Christian democratic parties. This variable thus consists of seven categories-radical right, conservative, liberal, Christian democratic, socialist, radical left, and green.…”

Issue framing, political identities, and public support for multilateral vaccine cooperation during Covid‐19

“…6–7; Hooghe & Marks, 2018, p. 125; Hooghe et al., 2019, p. 737). This cleavage has been variously described as a ‘transnational cleavage’ (Hooghe & Marks, 2018), a divide between integration and demarcation (Kriesi et al., 2006), cosmopolitanism and communitarianism (de Wilde et al., 2019) or green, alternative, libertarian versus traditional, authoritarian, nationalist attitudes (Dassonneville et al., 2023; Hooghe et al., 2002). Although these different conceptualizations of the cleavage in identity politics are not identical, there is a significant overlap (see also de Wilde et al., 2022, pp.…”