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The Mobilisation of the European Left in the Early 21st Century
Abstract
This study discerns peculiarities in the electoral mobilisation in EU member states in recent years and examines the effect of current social transformations on political discourse and voting behaviour. The overall change is traced to the emergence of opportunity-vs-risk vectors of political identification, challenging the capital vs labour dynamics of conflict. The decline in electoral support for traditional Left parties is attributed to the failure of the European Left to adjust to this realignment.
... While certain occupational sectors and sections of the population are more affected by precarity than others, the term can also be understood more broadly as a condition that has an of impact on all working people and jobs throughout the economy. As has been argued, some aspects of precarity cut visibly across all social strata, which has allowed the concept to gain a broader analytical scope and political relevance (Apostolidis 2019; Azmanova, 2004Azmanova, , 2010Azmanova, , 2011Azmanova, , 2020. To be sure, most studies on precarious labor and its repercussions have mainly focused on those groups most acutely affected by it, such as youth, women or migrants, whose circumstances reflect the most severe forms of involuntary flexibility (Cavia & Martínez 2013). ...
... and heightened exposure to competitive pressures in the context of the 'new economy' of open borders and information technology (Azmanova 2004(Azmanova , 2010(Azmanova , 2011. ...
This paper provides a review and discussion on the emancipatory potential of the notion of 'precarity'. Since the 1980s, the notion of 'precarity' has been used increasingly by scholars and activists to account for variegated grievances. Specifically, it has been used to address issues related to the transformations of labour in the XXIst century: neoliberal reorganization of labour markets, increasing unavailability of stable jobs, increased personal debts, debilitating labour unions or the lack of accessible housing among other issues. However, beyond structural grievances voiced by everyday workers, precarity can also serve as an analytical tool to pin down socially induced suffering at the systemic level of capitalist social relations. Precarity thus provides not only an understanding of social suffering from specific features of working people's employment in different sectors, industries, or with specific job contracts but also helps to grasp a fundamental feature of contemporary capitalism beyond labour markets and which cuts across class distinctions. It is thus a highly relevant task to scrutinize this notion and, as argued in this paper, take the politics of precarity seriously in the search for its emancipatory potential.
... A number of studies in the last two decades have begun to observe shifts in the basis of political alignment (Evans et al. 1996, Giddens 1994Inglehart and Rabier 1986;Inglehart and Welzel 2003;Kriesi 1998;Kitschelt 1997;Knutsen 1995). Among various explanations of these trans-European dynamics of change, some researchers have most observed the emergence of new axis of social conflict around the perceived effects of globalisation, causing, in turn, a new structural cleavage on the level of partisan alignment (Azmanova 2004;Kriesi et al., 2006). ...
... A new order-and -safety public agenda has emerged in recent years. This agenda has four constitutive elements: physical security, political order, cultural estrangement, and employment insecurity, as the economic component of the mix (Azmanova, 2004). This is an agenda in which concerns with income stability and physical safety, on the one hand, and on the other, of competitiveness in the global marketplace, have replaced the agenda of economic growth, market regulation and social transfer systems typical of the European Welfare State. ...
Analyses of the last two rounds of general elections in the EU (old) 15 member-states, as well as of the 1999 and 2004 European elections, reveal some of the symptoms of what Key and Burnham called "critical elections": elections that mark a sudden, considerable and lasting realignment in the electorate, leading to the formation of new electoral majorities. I explore the hypothesis that these series of critical elections at the turn of the century are triggering a radical realignment under the pressures of a new fault-line of conflict aggregation -- one shaped by attitudes to globalization. As a result, an opportunity-risk cleavage is emerging which is challenging, and opting out to replace, the capital-labor dynamics of conflict that have shaped the main political families in Europe over the 20th century. This paper traces the dynamics of realignment in terms of shifts at four levels: 1) The public agenda of political mobilization; 2) The social composition of electoral constituencies 3) the ideological basis of party competition. On this basis, an alignment is taking place, on the one hand between the centre-left and centre- right midpoint around an "opportunity" pole and, on the other, the circumference of far-right and radical-left parties around a "risk" pole. To what extend these pressures of realignment will manage to unfreeze (in reference to Rokkan and Lipset) the established party-political constellations in nation-states remains to the determined. However, tensions between the analyzed pressures of realignment and existing institutionalized forms of political representation go a long way in explaining the current crisis within both Social Democracy and European Conservatism, as well as the rise of new forms of populism in Europe.
... As Donatella della Porta (2006) has observed, globalization has been at the root of the resurgence of protest in the second half of the 1990s, when movements mobilized to protest the weakening of employment protections and the growth of social exclusion-the most immediate social consequences of global economic integration. 27 The novel saliency of globalization for political mobilization has been attributed either directly to the material impact of globalization (Kriesi et al. 2006) or to attitudes to the anticipated distribution of globalization's opportunities and risks (Azmanova 2004). ...
... A more recent study by the Princeton Center for Deliberative Democracy established that, when issues of social policy and EU enlargement are discussed 26 The impact of globalization on the electoral success of the far-Right has been analyzed in Swank and Betz (2003). For the impact of globalization on the Left, see Azmanova (2004). 27 The Euromarches started in Amsterdam in 1997; the European Social Forum was first held in 2002. ...
This article examines the status of globalization as a causal factor in political mobilization and proposes a research agenda for diagnosing the impact of global socio-economic dynamics on ideological orientation in national polities. Focusing on Europe’s established democracies, the article outlines recent shifts in Europe’s ideological landscape and explores the mechanisms generating a new pattern of political conflict and electoral competition. It advances the hypothesis that the knowledge economy of open borders has brought about a political cleavage intimately linked to citizens’ perceptions of the social impact of global economic integration. In this context, the polarization of life chances is determined by institutionally mediated exposure to both the economic opportunities and the hazards of globalization. Fostered by the increasing relevance of the international for state-bound publics, new fault-lines of social conflict are emerging, giving shape to a new, “opportunity-risk,” axis of political competition. As the novel political cleavage challenges the conventional left–right divide, it is likely to radically alter Europe’s ideological geography.
... Várias fontes informam um número de participantes entre 6,5 e 8 milhões. O atual impasse da esquerda tem muito a ver, obviamente, com a aptidão da extrema-direita para responder a clamores legítimos a respeito da subsistência ameaçada com os atalhos simplistas da xenofobia -com a fácil eficiência da "política do medo" (Azmanova, 2004;Azmanova, 2011;Wodak, 2015). Todavia, a impotência política tanto da centro-esquerda como da esquerda radical não pode ser completamente imputada à desfaçatez e à malícia da direita. ...
Tradução de: Azmanova, A. (2019). The paradox of emancipation: populism, democracy and the soul of the Left. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 45 (9-10), 1186-1207. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453719872291. Traduzido por Ivan Rodrigues Que conexão há entre o vagalhão populista e a queda do apoio eleitoral às tradicionais posições ideológicas à esquerda? Como podemos explicar o declínio da esquerda sob condições que deveriam estar catapultando-a para o poder? Argumento que a esquerda, na sua reação tanto à hegemonia neoliberal como à ascensão do populismo, está afetada pelo que Nietzsche chamou de “preconceito democrático” – o reflexo de ler a história como o advento e a crise da democracia. Em decorrência disso, a esquerda tenta agora recuperar a democracia por meio da ressurreição do conjunto de políticas de crescimento-e-redistribuição característico da “era dourada” da social-democracia nas três décadas após a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Esse gesto nostálgico, todavia, está levando a esquerda a outro impasse, àquilo que chamo de “paradoxo da emancipação” – ao lutar por igualdade e inclusão como condições essenciais da cidadania democrática, a esquerda está validando a ordem social no interior da qual ela está buscando igualdade e inclusão, a saber, a ordem social moldada pela produção concorrencial de lucro, a qual é a causa básica pela qual as nossas sociedades se encontram encalacradas. Concluo a análise propondo a construção de uma contra-hegemonia contra o capitalismo neoliberal mediante o alargamento do enfoque da esquerda, de modo a que a esquerda não se restrinja às suas preocupações tradicionais com a desigualdade e a exclusão, mas dê conta também da injustiça da crescente insegurança social e econômica – um dano cujo alcance vai além dos trabalhadores pobres. Uma agenda reformulada de justiça social que tenha como eixo questões de insegurança econômica que atravessam a “clivagem de classes” possibilitaria à esquerda mobilizar uma ampla coalizão de forças sociais para a transformação radical e duradoura em direção à democracia socialista.
... They may abandon the position of mass parties of the Left -which they held, communist and New Left challen- ges notwithstanding, throughout the twentieth century -and transform themselves into another middle-class party. In this case, working classes will either find even less representation in electoral politics, or other parties, left or right, will fill the void (Azmanova 2004;March and Mudde 2005;Thompson 2009). Alternatively, social democrats could try to reinvent themselves as hegemonic parties of the Left. ...
Offering a comparative look at social democratic experience since the Cold War, the volume examines countries where social democracy has long been an influential political force – Sweden, Germany, Britain, and Australia – while also considering the history of Canada’s NDP and the emergence of New Left parties in Germany and the province of Québec. The case studies point to a social democracy that has confirmed its rupture with the postwar order and its role as the primary political representative of workingclass interests. Once marked by redistributive and egalitarian policy perspectives, social democracy has, the book argues, assumed a new role – that of a modernizing force advancing the neoliberal cause.
... Consequently, the left-right cleavage that had structured the ideological landscape of modern societies since the French revolution is being replaced by a new one: public preferences for cosmopolitanism and international economic integration are clustering around a new pole (which I have named an Opportunity pole), pitted against preferences for cultural and economic protection (a Risk pole). These new clustering of public preferences along an opportunity-risk divide determined by attitudes to the new economy of open borders and technological innovation began to take shape already at the close of the last century (Azmanova 2004(Azmanova , 2010(Azmanova , 2011. ...
I argue that populism is not the cause of the erosion of diversity capital in contemporary democracies, it is its outcome. Focusing on the process of politicization of the social grievances articulated by populist parties and movements, I offer a diagnosis of the state of the political in contemporary democracies, in order to discern populism’s capacity to reboot democratic politics.
... The ideological core of the social contract of liberal societies and democratic capitalism has been the claim that risk and opportunity are evenly distributed across the social structure, so that for every individual the prudent use of opportunity and avoidance of risk results in outcomes for which he or she bears the sole responsibility. Instead, we see a development in which, as Albena Azmanova (2004) has argued, risk and opportunity are «unmixed», with parts of the population enjoying opportunity without major socioeconomic risk while others, the precarious and marginalized, are exposed to risk without opportunity. The consequences of growing inequalities of income, protection and opportunity are influentially analyzed by social epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) in their book The Spirit Level. ...
... While I am unable to determine whether it is social protectionism (Azmanova 2005 ...
... What we could refer to as the new order-and-safety agenda has four constitutive elements: physical security; political order; cultural estrangement; and income insecurity. 10 Let us note that while in the old public agenda (of the postwar welfare state) employment had been approached in terms of overall growth and efficiency, the new agenda refers to unemployment in terms of fear, loss and marginalization. ...
This is an inquiry into the economic psychology of trust: that is, what model of the political economy of complex liberal democracies is conducive to attitudes that allow difference to be perceived in the terms of ‘significant other’, rather than as a menacing or an irrelevant stranger. As a test case of prevailing perceptions of otherness in European societies, I examine attitudes towards Turkey’s accession to the European Union.
... When approached from the point of view of electoral alignment, the French and the Dutch referenda inscribe themselves into a more significant (in scope and duration) trend: that of the transformation of Europe's main political families via the replacement of the left-right cleavage by 1025 Azmanova: 1989 and the European Social Model one shaped by the opportunity-risk vectors of transnational economic integration, of which the enlargement agenda is part. I have addressed the emerging structural cleavage in Europe elsewhere 12 and here I will only outline relevant aspects of political mobilization as they bear upon the European Social Model. These aspects comprise the changed agenda of political competition as well as changes in the structure of electoral mobilization. ...
The post-communist revolutions of 1989 triggered parallel transformation in the ideological landscape on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. The geo-political opening after the end of the Cold War made global integration a highly salient factor in political mobilization, opting out to replace the capital-versus-labor dynamics of conflict that had shaped the ideological families of Europe during the 20th century. This has resulted in splitting the traditional constituencies of the Left and the Right and reorganizing them along new fault-lines: those shaped by attitudes to globalization and EU enlargement (in the West) and by attitudes to EU accession and global economic competition (in the East). Thus, an ideational convergence between East and West is taking place in Europe, radically altering the structure of political competition in the early 21st century. As the new political cleavage cuts across, rather than runs along, the left—right ideological continuum, it is eroding the societal alliances that had supported the post-war European Social Model. The emerging structure of political competition enables substantive changes in the European Social Model in the direction of deepening labor commodification, thus defeating the emancipatory potential that earlier labor-market policies had contained.
... Given the distribution of voters, the winning formula for far right parties does not seem to be to occupy a right-wing position on both dimensions as Kitschelt and McGann (1995) argued, but to position themselves more to the left in socio-economic terms as Kitschelt (2004) argued recently. Socialist parties stand to gain somewhat by becoming more right-wing on cultural issues, and it seems not unlikely that they will slowly adapt their policy positions to meet the demands of voters (see also Azmanova 2004). It is even conceivable that we may see the rise of left-wing anti-immigration parties in the future. ...
Kriesi et al. announced the birth of a new cleavage in contemporary Western Europe, one dividing the winners and losers of globalisation. Their studies in 2006 and 2008 contain analyses of party positions in six countries, based on the contents of editorial sections of newspapers. This article challenges the main conclusion of Kriesi et al. by demonstrating − on the basis of two expert surveys − that party positions are mainly structured by one dimension. The structure detected by Kriesi et al. in their analysis of parties is not found, except concerning voter positions. A consequence of this article's findings is that large groups of citizens are not represented by any parties, in particular those who are left-wing on socio-economic issues and right-wing on cultural issues. The article in its conclusion discusses possible causes for the differences between these findings and those of Kriesi et al., and the implications of these findings for democratic representation.
... Given the distribution of voters, the winning formula for far right parties does not seem to be to occupy a right-wing position on both dimensions as Kitschelt and McGann (1995) argued, but to position themselves more to the left in socio-economic terms as Kitschelt (2004) argued recently. Socialist parties stand to gain somewhat by becoming more right-wing on cultural issues, and it seems not unlikely that they will slowly adapt their policy positions to meet the demands of voters (see also Azmanova 2004). It is even conceivable that we may see the rise of left-wing anti-immigration parties in the future. ...
Kriesi et al. announced the birth of a new cleavage in contemporary Western Europe, one dividing the winners and losers of globalisation. Their studies in 2006 and 2008 contain analyses of party positions in six countries, based on the contents of editorial sections of newspapers. This article challenges the main conclusion of Kriesi et al. by demonstrating − on the basis of two expert surveys − that party positions are mainly structured by one dimension. The structure detected by Kriesi et al. in their analysis of parties is not found, except concerning voter positions. A consequence of this article's findings is that large groups of citizens are not represented by any parties, in particular those who are left-wing on socio-economic issues and right-wing on cultural issues. The article in its conclusion discusses possible causes for the differences between these findings and those of Kriesi et al., and the implications of these findings for democratic representation.
... We choose the terms demarcation and integration to emphasize our intellectual affinity with recent work by Hanspeter Kriesi et al (2006Kriesi et al ( , 2007. They argue that European integration and globalization are reshaping the cleavage structure in western Europe (see also Azmanova, 2004). This is strikingly similar to what we diagnose for Central and Eastern Europe. ...
How do political parties in Central and Eastern Europe position themselves on European integration? We show that the strongest predictor of a party's stance is ideology. The communist legacy and the European Union (EU) accession process – what we call the demarcation and integration magnets – created a bipolar magnetic field, in which political parties are aligned on a single axis from one pole bundling left-wing economics and cultural traditionalism to another pole combining market liberalism and cultural openness. Over time, the EU accession process compressed this axis by inducing parties to shift away from authoritarian-nationalist and hard left economic positions. Our analysis reveals how EU leverage has critically influenced the character of political competition in postcommunist states.
... In recent years the cognitive and normative framework of political culture has been transforming as a result of the formation of a new security-and-safety agenda with four constitutive elements: physical security, political order, cultural estrangement, and employment insecurity, as the economic component of the mix. (Azmanova 2004a) Symptomatic of this shift is the new way in which the issue of unemployment appears in political discourse: The old paradigm is concerned with employment in terms of overall growth and efficiency, while the new one focuses upon unemployment in terms of fear, loss, and marginalisation. In a neo-liberal economy marked by global economic competition and downsized labour markets, job insecurity (rather than unemployment Azmanova ...
Addressing the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, Albena Azmanova proceeds from the fact that any alternative – any positive utopia or alternative models of social existence – to this dominant socioeconomic model today seems to be fundamentally lacking. Within this condition of “anxious disorientation”, Azmanova seeks the enabling conditions for progressive radicalism, in particular in relation to social and ecological justice in Europe. She contends that the model of “class struggle” centred on the industrial proletariat has become counter-productive for social transformation, and suggests that multifaceted discontent with the new social conditions of an intensely competitive capitalism could better enable its overcoming, in forms that remain largely open to this day.
What is the connection between the surge of populism and the deflation of electoral support to traditional left-leaning ideological positions? How can we explain the downfall of the Left in conditions that should be propelling it to power? In its reaction both to the neo-liberal hegemony and to the rise of populism, I claim that the Left is afflicted by what Nietzsche called ‘a democratic prejudice’ – the reflex of reading history as the advent of democracy and its crisis. As a result, the Left now undertakes to recover democracy by resurrecting the growth-and-redistribution policy set that was a trademark of the ‘golden age’ of social democracy in the three post-war decades. This nostalgic gesture, however, is leading the Left into another predicament, which I call the ‘paradox of emancipation’ – while fighting for equality and inclusion as essential conditions for democratic citizenship, the Left is validating the social order within which equality and inclusion are being sought – namely, order shaped by the competitive production of profit which is the root cause of our societies’ plight. The analysis concludes with a proposal for building a counter-hegemony against neo-liberal capitalism by means of enlarging the Left’s focus beyond its traditional concerns with inequality and exclusion, to address also the injustice of growing social and economic insecurity – a harm whose reach surpasses the working poor. Reformulating an agenda of social justice around issues of economic insecurity that cross the ‘class divide’ would allow the Left to mobilize a broad coalition of social forces for radical and lasting change in the direction of socialist democracy.
Voters with lower socio-economic status are now consistently overrepresented among the radical right electorate. According to the ‘new winning formula’, many radical right parties increasingly move to the left on socio-economic issues to cater to these voters. This study tests a crucial assumption underlying this formula: whether radical right parties with socio-economically left-leaning positions actually attract more working class voters. By mapping class characteristics of the electorate of 10 radical right parties at three time points (based on surveys) against these parties' positions on the economic dimension (according to experts), this study shows that the ‘class gap’ - the extent to which class indicators predict voters' propensity to vote for the radical right - is significantly larger for socio-economically leftwing parties.
This article presents an alternative causal argument to the decline of class-based politics in the developed world. Opening with a critical engagement of Inglehart's postmaterialist value-shift hypothesis, the article demonstrates that both class and materialism are rife in supposedly postmaterialist societies. Therefore, an alternative explanation must be unearthed for the decline in class-based politics. Utilising a causal Marxist framework, the explanation offered is that, due to rapid technological advancement coupled with globalisation, the traditional members of the labour class are atomised due to the increasing reliance on individual human capital in opposition to standardised labour as a productive input. Thus, traditional labour becomes dependant on capital for intrinsic value. Moreover, through financialisation and labour-market liquidity – all structural realities of the post-industrial economy – the traditional interests of labour, redistribution and de-commodification, increasingly resemble capital, room for aggregate growth and individuation. In other words, capital as a class, through appropriating traditionally labour-oriented political entities, is remaking man into its own image through the socially disembedded and immutable forces of the market – a classically totalitarian phenomenon.
This thesis charts the development of the parties of the contemporary European radical left over the period 1989-2013. Its aim is to provide a convincing interpretative framework on the topic and an innovative contribution to the scholarship on comparative party analysis. The discussion will focus on three case studies (Germany, France and Italy), selected for their central importance within the European Union and for the diversity of their starting points and trajectories.
The analysis addresses three main research questions. Firstly, what is the relevance of radical left parties within contemporary political systems and societies (their societal weight) and what are the main determinants of their growth and decline? Secondly, how can we make sense of the evolution of their political nature, namely the transformations in their ideology, sociology, organisation and strategy? Thirdly, what are the key drivers behind the tendencies to regroupment and fragmentation? I answer to these interrogatives by placing the development of the contemporary radical left firmly within the context of a process of neoliberalisation of Western European societies and of an emerging vacuum of political representation of working class and welfarist constituencies. Moreover, I show how an aggregate, multi-dimensional and multi-level approach can help to further our understanding of radical left dynamics and contradictions.
The first chapter will provide a theoretical conceptualisation of the radical left as a political space defined by representational contents and by its relationship with the moderate left. The second chapter will present an overview of its historical roots (since 1914) and of its broader Western European context. The central chapters (three, four and five) will be devoted to an in-depth analysis of the three country studies. The final chapter will explicitly compare the German, French and Italian trajectories, draw together the main findings and illustrate their broader significance for political research.
In this article, the authors set out to evaluate two competing mechanisms that may account for the negative relationship between xenophobia and left voting. Xenophobia may reduce left voting because parties of the right are more conservative on issues relating to immigration and ethnic relations (the policy-bundling effect), or it may reduce left voting because many potential left voters lack sympathy with the groups to whom redistribution is thought to be directed (the anti-solidarity effect). These two mechanisms imply radically different scenarios for political competition. Using a multilevel modeling approach, the authors analyze the data compiled in fifteen different surveys carried out in ten Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between 1990 and 2000. This study is the first to draw out the implications of these mechanisms for left voting and to subject them to empirical scrutiny in a large-scale comparative study. The results are consistent with the existence of a relatively strong policy-bundling effect; by contrast, the anti-solidarity effect is trivial in most of the surveys analyzed.
The article looks at New Labour's move beyond right/left in the mid/late 1990s, which is an occasion to spell out the nature of right/left and what it means for democracy. In contrast to both defenders and critics of this move I argue in the first part that right/left is not an empty label bound up with the cleavage-lines of industrial society, but that it is an orientational metaphor which is articulated with others—in/out, up/down and front/back—and that we are in the process of moving beyond the industrial society right/left prototype. The second part looks at where New Labour is heading when moving beyond right/left. I argue that the new hegemonic orientation is that of front/back, which designs political renewal as a response to the social changes cutting across the outdated lines of contestation of partisan politics. The democratic problem of this move lies in squeezing politics between technocratic management and moralizing appeals.
The geo-political opening that was triggered by the anti-communist revolutions in 1989-1990 in Eastern Europe made trans-national economic and political integration a highly salient factor in ideological orientation and political mobilization. Thus, new ideological fault-lines have emerged over the past two decades in Europe, on both sides of the former iron curtain. Shaped by 'opportunity' and 'risk' attitudes to globalization and European unification, these new fault-lines are opting to replace the capital-labor dynamics of conflict that had shaped Europe’s ideological landscape over the twentieth century. This new logic and structure of political competition is one of the sources of pressure on coordinated market economies in the early 21st century. These pressures, however, lead not to transition from the coordinated to a liberal type of market economy but to a likely transformation from conservative to social-democratic welfare regime.
The article traces the emergence of “reorganized” capitalism as consecutively the fourth modality of capitalism – after the 19th century entrepreneurial form, the post-liberal “organized” capitalism of the welfare state, and the “disorganized” neo-liberal model of the late 20th century. The features of the fourth modality emerge from an analysis of (1) the key dynamics of social stratification, (2) the matrix of state-society relations, and (3) the structure of electoral mobilization in advanced industrial democracies.
Do individual-level attitudes play a significant role in sustaining democratic institutions at the societal level? In a recent article in Comparative Politics, Seligson argued that the strong aggregate-level correlations Inglehart found between political culture and stable democracy were spurious because there are no individual-level correlations between political culture and overt support for democracy. Seligson's analysis exemplifies the sort of cross-level fallacy he attributes to Inglehart: he equates individual-level support for democracy with the presence of democratic institutions. However, individual-level support of democracy is only weakly linked with societal-level democracy. Democracy currently has a positive image almost everywhere, but favorable opinions are often superficial. Unless they are accompanied by more deeply rooted orientations of tolerance, trust, and participation, chances for effective democracy are poor.
More than two decades ago, the authors of Political Action (Barnes et al. 1979) predicted that what was then called “unconventional political participation” would become more widespread throughout advanced industrial societies, because it was part of a deep-rooted intergenerational change. Time series data from the 1974 Political Action survey, together with data from four waves of the World Values Surveys demonstrates that this change has indeed taken place—to such an extent that petitions, boycotts, and other forms of direct action are no longer unconventional but have become more or less normal actions for a large part of the citizenry of post-industrial societies.
This type of elite-challenging actions also played an important part in the Third Wave of democratization—but after the transition to democracy, most of the new democracies subsequently experienced a post-honeymoon phase of disillusionment with democracy, in which direct political action declined. This paper analyzes data from more than 70 countries containing more than 80 percent of the world’s population, interpreting the long-term dynamics of elite-challenging political participation in both established democracies and new democracies. Our interpretation implies that the current decline in direct political action in the new democracies is a “post-honeymoon” period effect; in the long run, we expect that elite-challenging activity will move on an upward trajectory in most of the new democracies, as has been the case in virtually all established democracies.
As countries become more industrialized, they find no direct correlation between financial prowess and emotional well‐being. While the modern world prioritized economic‐led growth, the postmodern society will place more value on environmental protection and cultural identity.
The debate about the stability or change in contemporary Western European party systems is characterised by a cacophony of contradictory voices. On one side are those who see still the same old blocs of parties on the left and the right, large and small party machines, and dominance of parties’ parliamentary and government leaders over the party membership. On the other side, some see a dramatic process of restructuring in European party systems with new parties, profound shifts of power and strategy within established parties, and novel forms of party organisation. Many of the seemingly contradictory views can be explained by distinguishing different types of party system change. I will first provide a simplified sketch of conventional post-Second World War European party systems and then turn to the changes in European polities since the 1960s or 1970s.
1. Introduction 2. Globalization, democracy, and the welfare state 3. Global capital, political institutions, and contemporary welfare state development: quantitative analysis 4. Big welfare states in global markets: internationalization and welfare state reform in the Nordic social democracies 5. Globalization and policy change in corporatist conservative welfare states 6. Internationalization and liberal welfare states: a synopsis 7. Assessing long-term impacts: the impact of globalization on taxation, institutions, and control of the macroeonomy 8. Conclusions: national welfare states in a global economy.
Butler and Stokes' authoritative analysis of the British electorate concluded that in general voters' political attitudes were poorly formed and, in consequence, unstable and inconsistent. This paper re-examines this question by developing and evaluating multiple-item scales of two core dimensions of mass political beliefs: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values. The scales are shown to have respectable levels of internal consistency, high levels of stability over a one-year period, and to be useful predictors of support for political parties. In these respects they compare favourably with other commonly used indicators of political attitudes, values and ideology (left-right self-placement, postmaterialism and attitudes to nationalization). This superiority applies across different levels of political involvement. Contrary to the conclusions of earlier research into mass political ideology in Britain, therefore, it is contended that in general the electorate has meaningful political beliefs. Moreover, as the scales developed in this research form part of the British and Northern Irish Social Attitudes Series and recent British Election Studies, they provide an important resource for further studies of political culture in the UK.
Over the last two decades, many social scientists have argued that the stable class politics of industrial capitalism is giving way to newer types of social and attitudinal cleavages. Some scholars have gone further to associate what they see as significant declines in the anchorings provided by class with the rise of new political movements, parties, and even politicians standing for office completely outside traditional party systems. Advances in class theory and statistical methods coupled with the availability of high quality data have led others to reexamine the issue. They have suggested that these arguments reflect a misreading of the empirical evidence and/or exaggerate the significance of these developments. We conclude that despite the absence of a clear consensus in the field, theories asserting a universal process of class dealignment are not supported.
In 2002 France experienced a shock that made the Vth Republic tremble. Ever since 1965, when the Republic first elected its President by direct universal suffrage, the most important election in French political life has always provided its share of surprises.1 The 2002 edition proved to be no exception - quite the reverse. The first round delivered a shock that felt like an earthquake.
Professor V. O. Key, Jr., of Harvard University, is widely known for his studies in party politics. Professor Key was formerly Book Review Editor of The Journal of Politics.
Have the meanings of ‘left’ and ‘right’ changed during the last twenty years? In this article the ten-point left-right self-placement scale is correlated with three central value orientations (religious/secular, economic left-right and materialist/post-materialist values) to examine whether associations between these value orientations and the self-placement scale have changed from the early 1970s to 1990. Four theories about the changing meaning of the left-right language are presented. These theories about the irrelevance, persistence, transformation and pluralisation of the meaning of left and right are tested by using Eurobarometer data from eight West European countries and the second wave of the European Value Study from 1990. The data provide strong support for pluralisation theory. Left-right semantics have an impressive absorptive power, describing an over-arching spatial dimension capable of incorporating many types of conflict. Left-right semantics are significantly correlated with religious/secular values, remain highly correlated with the dominant industrial value orientations (economic left-right values), and are increasingly associated with materialist/post-materialist value orientations. The new meanings of left and right are added to the old meanings.
Throughout this century, the Marxist Left in Europe has emphasized an economic interpretation of history, with state ownership of the means of production as the key element in their prescription for society. Political polarization is depicted as a direct reflection of social class conflict, with the working class the natural base of support for the Left. This diagnosis has become increasingly out of touch with reality in recent years, which have seen the decline of orthodox Marxist parties in Western Europe and the diminishing credibility of the ideology on which they are based. For as advanced industrial society emerges, economic determinism provides a progressively less adequate analysis of society, and class-based parties and the policies they advocate become less central to politics. Economic development reduces the impact of economic determinism. Though economic factors tend to play a dominant role in the early stages of industrial society, in advanced industrial society their relative importance diminishes; and self-expression, ‘belonging’ and the quality of the physical and social environment become increasingly important.
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This article focuses on the changes in the economic policy of the Front National (FN) which have taken place in the last 3–4 years. It argues that the apparent switch from neo‐liberalism to protectionism by the FN must be treated with caution: protectionism per se is not new to the FN, nor can one state that neo‐liberal policies have disappeared from its economic agenda. I discuss whether changes in the field of economic policy reflect wider changes to the overall ideological configuration of the FN, arguing that such changes represent part of a wider move by the FN in the direction of a political programme espousing a ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and communism. Finally, it discusses the reasons behind the changes in both the economic policy of the party and its ideological configuration.
In this pioneering work, Paul R. Abramson and Ronald Inglehart show that the gradual shift from Materialist values (such as the desire for economic and physical security) to Post-materialist values (such as the desire for freedom, self-expression, and the quality of life) is in all likelihood a global phenomenon. Value Change in Global Perspective analyzes over thirty years worth of national surveys in European countries and presents the most comprehensive and nuanced discussion of this shift to date. By paying special attention to the way generational replacement transforms values among mass publics, the authors are able to present a comprehensive analysis of the processes through which values change. In addition, Value Change in Global Perspective analyzes the 1990-91 World Values Survey, conducted in forty societies representing over seventy percent of the world's population. These surveys cover an unprecedentedly broad range of the economic and political spectrum, with data from low-income countries (such as China, India, Mexico, and Nigeria), newly industrialized countries (such as South Korea) and former state-socialist countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This data adds significant new meaning to our understanding of attitude shifts throughout the world. Value Change in Global Perspective has been written to meet the needs of scholars and students alike. The use of percentage, percentage differences, and algebraic standardization procedures will make the results easy to understand and useful in courses in comparative politics and in public opinion. Paul R. Abramson is Professor of Political Science, Michigan State University. Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political Science and Program Director, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.
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