Simon Bornschier

University of Zurich | UZH · Institut für Politikwissenschaft

Natural resource exploitation often generates negative externalities and fuels social conflict. Yet, patterns of social resistance against mining differ considerably within and across countries. What explains differences in the occurrence and duration of anti-mining protest? Distinguishing explicitly between protest onset and continuation , we theo...

Western Europe is experiencing growing levels of political polarization between parties of the New Left and the Far Right. In many countries, the socio-structural foundations of this divide (class, education, residence) are by now so clear that many interpret this divide as a fully mobilized new electoral cleavage. However, cleavage formation also...

The last decades have seen the emergence of a divide pitting the new left against the far right in advanced democracies. We study how this universalism-particularism divide is crystallizing into a full-blown cleavage, complete with structural, political and identity elements. So far, little research exists on the identities that voters themselves p...

Natural resource exploitation often generates negative externalities and fuels social conflict. Yet, patterns of social resistance against mining differ considerably within and across countries. What explains differences in the occurrence and duration of anti-mining protest? Distinguishing explicitly between protest onset and continuation, we theor...

Contexts outside the advanced developed democracies present a challenge to assessing how well party systems reflect voter preferences across over-arching policy dimensions because not all electorates readily interpret political conflict in dimensional terms. In this contribution, I advocate an approach suited for such contexts that combines deducti...

Although ideological polarization can create problems for governability and democratic stability, this article argues that it also has beneficial effects in new democracies. By clarifying the political alternatives, polarization creates strong links between parties and voters, and thereby instills accountability mechanisms that force parties to rem...

This chapter underscores the merit of studying the emergence and growth of the radical right from a cleavage perspective, which sees party system change as rooted in large-scale transformations of social structure. The chapter begins by discussing explanations for the rise of the radical right in terms of the educational revolution, the processes o...

This chapter brings the ideational approach to populism into dialogue with cleavage-based accounts of party system change. Both approaches converge in the idea that failures of democratic representation create populist potentials. This contribution starts out by testing this hypothesis across Latin America and Western Europe by analyzing one case o...

Populism has become pervasive in political language and in the diagnosis of the malaise of contemporary politics. At the same time, more narrow definitions of populism have become shared in scholarship on the subject, nourishing more analytical approaches that put populism in historical and cross-regional perspective. The purpose of this introducti...

Party relationships in the Swiss party system have become substantially more antagonistic over the past decades. This article analyzes the actors and ideologies that have triggered the emergence of a polarizing cultural antagonism, and shows that this conflict is not primarily about Switzerland's relationship with Europe. The implications of the em...

This paper focuses on the congruence between party positions and voter preferences directly after the “third wave” of democratization in Latin America, and on its historical origins. Latin America displays a wide variation in the degree to which parties are anchored in society and reflect specific social groups. I argue that party systems that expe...

Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe. By MabelBerezin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 324p. $107.00 cloth, $37.99 paper. - Volume 11 Issue 1 - Simon Bornschier

El presente artículo se ocupa de los orígenes y los niveles de congruencia en la representación luego de la tercera ola democratizadora en América Latina. Pone a prueba el argumento que sostiene que los sistemas de partidos que han experimentado polarización ideológica a principios del siglo XX y estaban ubicados en el camino programático hoy en dí...

Read the introduction: To many, the transformation of West European party systems since the 1970s and 1980s was seen as evidence that the era of cleavage based politics was over. The rise of identity politics was interpreted not only as a result of the waning of the traditional class and religious cleavages, but as evidence for a new era in which...

This article analyzes why, despite similar transformations in the dimensions structuring political space since the late 1980s, extreme right-wing populist parties have emerged in some West European countries, but not in others. Two factors may affect the fortunes of these parties. First, if electorates remain firmly entrenched in older cleavages, n...

This paper investigates to which degree political parties in the fifteen old EU member states have mobilized Euroscepticism. Contrary to the prevailing view, neither national politics, nor orientations regarding Europe are one-dimensional. From this perspective, the EU-issue does not necessarily crosscut national lines of conflict. Rather, economic...

Over the last two decades, right-wing populist parties in Western Europe have gained sizable vote shares and power, much to the fascination and consternation of political observers. Meshing traditionalism and communitarian ideals, right-wing populist parties have come to represent a polar normative ideal to the New Left in Western Europe. In his dy...

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 c...

New structural potentials related to the processes of globalisation and European integration have produced far-reaching changes in the structure of opposition in the French party system. Whereas the newly designed institutions of the Fifth Republic progressively brought about a ‘bipolar multipartism’ in the first two decades of their existence, the...

Stein Rokkan’s comparative historical account of party system formation in Western Europe has proved enormously influential due to the appeal of tying individual political behaviour to large-scale historical transformations. This article reviews the literature that has studied the genesis of cleavage-based party systems, as well as theoretical and...

Over the past three decades the effects of globalization and denationalization have created a division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in Western Europe. This study examines the transformation of party political systems in six countries (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK) using opinion surveys, as well as newly collec...

Simon Bornscheir, Timotheos Frey, Hanspeter Kriesi en Romain Lachat zijn verbonden aan het Instituut voor Politieke Wetenschappen van de Universiteit van Zürich; Martin Dolezal en Edgar Grande werken voor het Geschwister Scholl Instituut voor Politieke Wetenschappen van de Ludwig-Maximilians-Universiteit in München.

  This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization ‘winners’...

This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization 'winners' a...

United against globalisation? An analysis of the convergence of European right-wing populist party programmes This paper considers the growth of right-wing populist parties as one of the elements in a broader transformation of European party systems, resulting from the emergence of issues related to identity and as a counter-reaction to the liberta...

Die SVP hat sich in den letzten 15 Jahren stark gewandelt. Früher nur in ländlichen und protestantischen Regionen angesiedelt, ist sie unter dem Einfluss von Christoph Blocher zur stärksten Partei auf nationaler Ebene geworden. Dieses Buch bietet eine detaillierte Analyse der Gründe dieses Aufstiegs.Nach den eidgenössischen Wahlen 2003 kam es zum e...