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Mapping the South European Ideological Space: The Impact of Globalization on Party Discourse in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive account of the structure of ideological space in Southern Europe and contribute to the ongoing discussion concerning the impact of globalization on the domestic politics of European countries. We analyze party manifestos from European elections in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal using multidimensional scaling. Even though our findings largely support the hypothesis that components of the globalization divide tend to transform the content of the traditional cultural-political dimension, we observe that this transformation occurs in different ways across national contents.
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This article introduces the theme of ‘Europeanization’ in the context of the focus on contemporary southern and Mediterranean Europe. In applying the term ‘periphery’ to the region, it argues that the major contrasts that exist between it and the ‘core’ EU states serve to highlight in stark terms the challenges endemic within the Europeanization process. It explores the different meanings of ‘Europeanization’ and argues that it necessitates a broad focus and a complex ontology. The case studies that follow are placed within the perspective of domestic institutional adaptation, albeit in multi-tiered, core-periphery setting. The southern experience highlights the dynamism, asymmetry and fragmentation of the Europeanization process. These attributes are of increasing significance both to an understanding of the patterns of change underway in the region and to the future stability and cohesion of the EU itself.
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' and 'losers' is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to two intimately related dynamics: the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space and the strategic repositioning of the political parties within the transforming space. The article presents several hypotheses with regard to these two dynamics and tests them empirically on the basis of new data concerning the supply side of electoral politics from six Western European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The results indicate that in all the countries, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular even in a country like France.
The specific research questions that lie at the heart of this article correspond to three related but distinct areas of inquiry: a) the ideology of neoliberalism and the broad empirical question concerning its suggested status of present-day `hegemonic' ideology; b) the explanatory power of `class' with regard to questions of ideology; and c) regional patterns of popularity of neoliberal ideas in Europe, with a focus on the countries of southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece). The findings of the study reveal that: a) there are surprisingly low levels of support for neoliberal ideas across Europe; b) class (when conceptualized and operationalized more subtly) continues to be a very useful explanatory tool of relative ideological orientation; and c) social and institutional differences between northern and southern Europe are also reflected at the ideological level.