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Kosmopolitisches und parochiales Freizeit- und Urlaubsverhalten und ihr Einfluss auf Kandidatensympathie und Wahlabsicht im Kontext der Bundestagswahl 2017
Abstract
Eine Fülle von Studien hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten mit der zurückgehenden Erklärungskraft der Zugehörigkeit von Bürgern zu bestimmten sozialen Gruppen für das individuelle Wahlverhalten in westeuropäischen Demokratien beschäftigt. Während die empirische Evidenz dieser Studien weitgehend gemischt ausfällt, bleibt festzuhalten, dass der wirtschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Wandel zu einem teils deutlichen Rückgang der über den cleavage-Ansatz definierten Kerngruppen von traditionellen Anhängern der Christ- und Sozialdemokraten – in Deutschland Katholiken mit hoher Kirchenbindung bzw. gewerkschaftsnahe (Industrie-)Arbeiter – an der Gesamtbevölkerung geführt hat. Ein immer größer werdender Teil der Wählerschaft ist damit parteiungebundener geworden, was nicht nur eine höhere Fluktuation in den Stimmenanteilen der Parteien wahrscheinlicher macht, sondern auch den Erfolg neuer Parteien bei Wahlen begünstigen kann. In diesem Beitrag wird – mit Rückgriff auf jüngere Studien zur Wahl- und Einstellungsforschung, die sich insbesondere mit den Determinanten der Wahl Obamas und Trumps beschäftigen – der Frage nachgegangen, inwiefern Indikatoren, die vordergründig unpolitische, die Freizeitaktivität von Bürgern widerspiegelnde Faktoren einen Beitrag dazu leisten können, die Wahlabsicht gegenüber etablierten oder neuen Parteien besser zu erklären.
In this paper, we develop a framework for studying the role of group identities in contemporary cleavage formation. Identities, we suggest, hold the key to a central conundrum of current political sociology: the fact that today’s electoral realignments appear to be rooted in the social structure of post-industrial societies, while the decline of mass organizations has dissolved traditional links between politics and social structure. Bringing cleavage theory into dialog with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, we theorize how group identities may play an important role in stabilizing a new universalism-particularism cleavage emerging in Western Europe today. We identify two key processes of cleavage identity formation: bottom-up processes of “social closure” and top-down “classification struggles” waged by political entrepreneurs. For both processes, we review empirical findings and formulate an agenda for further research.
This article argues that the perforation of national states by immigration, integration and trade may signify a critical juncture in the political development of Europe no less consequential for political parties and party systems than the previous junctures that Lipset and Rokkan detect in their classic article. We present evidence suggesting that (1) party systems are determined in episodic breaks from the past; (2) political parties are programmatically inflexible; and, (3) as a consequence, party system change comes in the form of rising parties.
Popular explanations of the Brexit vote have centred on the division between cosmopolitan internationalists who voted Remain, and geographically rooted individuals who voted Leave. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical test of whether residential immobility – the concept underpinning this distinction – was an important variable in the Brexit vote. We find that locally rooted individuals – defined as those living in their county of birth – were 7 percent more likely to vote Leave. However, the impact of immobility was filtered by local circumstances: immobility only mattered for respondents in areas experiencing relative economic decline or increases in migrant populations
What influences parties’ issue attention towards immigration and integration? This study provides answers to this question by focusing on the party competition at the regional level in Germany, a country that has been strongly affected by the refugee crisis. Building on a novel data set which covers altogether 510 electoral manifestos during 108 federal and regional elections between 1990 and 2016, we assess the influence of party-specific, situational as well as structural factors on issue attention towards immigration and integration policies. Using descriptive statistics and regression analysis, we find that parties’ attention is significantly associated with citizens’ attention towards these issues. Furthermore, ideologically conflicting parties differ considerably in the share of their manifestos they devote to the issue. Interestingly, the electoral threat by populist radical right parties has no effect on the issue attention of mainstream competitors.
This article argues that the perforation of national states by immigration, integration and trade may signify a critical juncture in the political development of Europe no less consequential for political parties and party systems than the previous junctures that Lipset and Rokkan detect in their classic article. We present evidence suggesting that (1) party systems are determined in episodic breaks from the past; (2) political parties are programmatically inflexible; and, (3) as a consequence, party system change comes in the form of rising parties.
Popular accounts of “lifestyle politics” and “culture wars” suggest that political and ideological divisions extend also to leisure activities, consumption, aesthetic taste, and personal morality. Drawing on a total of 22,572 pairwise correlations from the General Social Survey (1972–2010), the authors provide comprehensive empirical support for the anecdotal accounts. Moreover, most ideological differences in lifestyle cannot be explained by demographic covariates alone. The authors propose a surprisingly simple solution to the puzzle of lifestyle politics. Computational experiments show how the self-reinforcing dynamics of homophily and influence dramatically amplify even very small elective affinities between lifestyle and ideology, producing a stereotypical world of “latte liberals” and “bird-hunting conservatives” much like the one in which we live.
For many years, there has been an intense debate over the importance of social class as a basis of political partisanship and ideological divisions in advanced industrial societies. The arguments of postmodernists and disillusioned socialists have been combined with those of numerous empirical researchers on both sides of the Atlantic—and in both sociology and political science—who have claimed that class inequality has lost its political importance. Yet at the same time, the class politics proselytizers—whether Marxist or otherwise—have remained unpersuaded. This book presents a state‐of‐the‐art analysis of the changing nature of class voting and the salience of class politics in advanced industrial societies. It combines broad ranging cross‐national comparison with detailed country studies and empirical tests of key theoretical and methodological explanations of changing levels of class voting. The final section includes commentaries from distinguished scholars from the fields of social stratification, political science, and political sociology, followed by a general discussion.
The strengths of the book are the following: (1)a combination of breadth and depth, which uses both comparative analysis of up to 16 countries and detailed analyses of several of the more critical cases; (2) methodological sophistication: a particularly high quality is attained in the measurement of class and voting, and in the statistical analysis of their relations through time; (3) an interchange of skills and knowledge from political science, social stratification research, and the sociology of politics; and (4) an international collection of established and in some cases extremely eminent contributors.
On the basis of the evidence presented, it is argued that in many cases class divisions in voting have not declined. Much of current orthodoxy among both political scientists and sociologists with regard to the declining class basis of politics is brought into question by the ’The End of Class Politics?’. This should enable it to serve as a major reference point for future work and discussion on the social bases of political divisions.
The readership includes both sociologists, primarily in the areas of political sociology and stratification and political scientists. As an authoritative research statement it would appeal to practitioners, graduate classes, and advanced undergraduate courses. It would also be useful for advanced research methods teaching, as it would provide a more effective demonstration of the relation between methods and substance than do texts that teach methods per se. The inclusion of three chapters looking at the US, both as a case study and in cross‐national context, make it relevant to an American as well as European audience.
The paper looks into the processes and outcomes of setting-up and maintaining a probability-based longitudinal online survey, which is recruited face-to-face and representative of both the online and offline population aged 16 to 75 in Germany. This German Internet Panel (GIP) studies political and economic attitudes and reform preferences through bi-monthly longitudinal online interviews of individuals. The results presented demonstrate that a carefully designed and implemented online panel can produce high-quality data at lower marginal costs than existing panels that operate solely in face-to-face mode. Analyses into the representativeness of the online sample showed no major coverage or nonresponse biases. Finally, including offline households in the panel is important as it improves the representation of the older and female segments of the population.
The mobilization of culturally rooted issues has altered political competition throughout Western Europe. This article analyzes to what extent the mobilization of immigration issues has affected how people identify with politics. Specifically, it analyzes whether voters’ left/right self-identifications over the past 30 years increasingly correspond to cultural rather than economic attitudes. This study uses longitudinal data from the Netherlands between 1980 and 2006 to demonstrate that as time progresses, voters’ left/right self-placements are indeed more strongly determined by anti-immigrant attitudes than by attitudes towards redistribution. These findings show that the issue basis of left/right identification is dynamic in nature and responsive to changes in the political environment.
Economic conditions shape election outcomes in the world's democracies. Good times keep parties in office, bad times cast them out. This proposition is robust, as the voluminous body of research reviewed here demonstrates. The strong findings at the macro level are founded on the economic voter, who holds the government responsible for economic performance, rewarding or punishing it at the ballot box. Although voters do not look exclusively at economic issues, they generally weigh those more heavily than any others, regardless of the democracy they vote in.
By means of a reanalysis of the most relevant data source—the International Social Mobility and Politics File—this article criticizes the newly grown consensus in political sociology that class voting has declined since World War II. An increase in crosscutting cultural voting, rooted in educational differences rather than a decline in class voting, proves responsible for the decline of traditional class-party alignments. Moreover, income differences have not become less but more consequential for voting behavior during this period. It is concluded that the new consensus has been built on quicksand. Class is not dead—it has been buried alive under the increasing weight of cultural voting, systematically misinterpreted as a decline in class voting because of the widespread application of the so-called Alford index.
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.
A new conventional wisdom characterizes the comparative study of electoral politics. Social cleavages, once a stabilizing factor of electoral behavior in Western Europe, are on the wane. Voting decisions have become individualized and old social cleavages have been superseded by new value-related cleavages. This article challenges that view as an exaggeration. Social cleavages have not dis-appeared and are not in universal decline, as demonstrated by an examination of data from seven countries from 1975 to 2002. Religious–secular voting is mostly stable, while class voting shows an unambiguous decline in only some of the countries under study. Further, neither rising levels of cognitive mobilization nor a dissemination of postmaterialist value priorities can account for these changes in class voting. The exaggeration of limited changes to general trends seems to rest on a disregard of the effects of party competition on patterns of electoral behavior. I suggest that further research should focus on the effects of parties' electoral strategies on the electoral relevance of social cleavages.
Im Anschluss an den kürzlich in der Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie erschienenen Artikel von Pappi und Brandenburg untersucht dieser Beitrag, ob und inwiefern der Einfluss der Zugehörigkeit
zu einer sozialen Gruppe auf das Wahlverhalten im Zeitverlauf abgenommen hat. In einem zweiten Schritt wird der Frage nachgegangen,
ob ein ausschlaggebender Einfluss Cleavage-gebundenen Wählens besteht, wenn weitere, theoretisch hergeleitete Variablen in
das Analysemodell mit eingebaut werden. Auf der Grundlage eines Datensatzes, der alle Bundestagswahlstudien von 1969 bis 2009
umfasst, kann gezeigt werden, dass selbst bei Berücksichtigung von Kandidatenpräferenz und Problemlösungskompetenz die soziale
Gruppenzugehörigkeit der Wähler einen entscheidenden Einfluss auf die Wahlabsicht ausübt. Wird zusätzlich für Generationsgruppen
kontrolliert, dann ergibt sich lediglich ein Bedeutungsrückgang der religiös-konfessionellen Konfliktlinie auf das Wahlverhalten.
The aim of this study is to analyse whether the impact of cleavages on voting behaviour in Germany has decreased over time.
Additionally, the study evaluates whether the belonging to a social group is still of relevance for voting behaviour after
including further theoretically derived determinants. On the basis of a pooled dataset that covers all German national election
studies between 1969 and 2009, the analysis reveal that the class cleavage and the religious cleavage are still of relevance
for voting behaviour in Germany, even when controlling for the voter’s candidate preference and problem-solving capacity of
a political party as perceived by the voters.
SchlüsselwörterSoziale Konfliktlinien-Wahlverhalten-Bundestagswahlen-Kandidaten- und Themenorientierung
KeywordsCleavages-Voting behaviour-Bundestag elections-Candidate- and issue-voting
Citizens are political simpletons—that is only a modest exaggeration of a common characterization of voters. Certainly, there is no shortage of evidence of citizens' limited political knowledge, even about matters of the highest importance, along with inconsistencies in their thinking, some glaring by any standard. But this picture of citizens all too often approaches caricature. This book brings together leading political scientists who offer new insights into the political thinking of the public, the causes of party polarization, the motivations for political participation, and the paradoxical relationship between turnout and democratic representation. These studies propel a foundational argument about democracy. Voters can only do as well as the alternatives on offer. These alternatives are constrained by third players, in particular activists, interest groups, and financial contributors. The result: voters often appear to be shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent because the alternatives they must choose between are shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent.
Die Kurzanalyse berichtet die Ergebnisse einer Expertenumfrage zur programmatischen Ausrichtung der deutschen Parteien im Herbst 2017. Online befragt wurden 93 Politikwissenschaftlerinnen und Politikwissenschaftler. Erhoben wurden die Positionen von acht Parteien auf sechs sachpolitischen Dimensionen sowie die Wichtigkeit dieser Themenbereiche für die Parteien. Im vorliegenden Beitrag prüfen wir zunächst die Reliabilität des Messinstruments und vergleichen dann die Wichtigkeit der Themenbereiche. Neben der Wirtschaftspolitik wird insbesondere die Zuwanderungspolitik als besonders wichtig eingestuft. Hingegen verlieren, im Vergleich zu früheren Umfragen, die Gesellschaftspolitik und die Umweltpolitik an Bedeutung. Die Positionen der etablierten Parteien sind konsistent mit der Erwartung eines mehrdimensionalen Politikraums, in welchem die Freien Demokraten (FDP) eine wirtschaftsliberale (rechte) Position in der Wirtschafts-und Umweltpolitik und eine progressive (linke) Position in der Gesellschaftspolitik einnehmen. Die Daten erlauben auch eine Einordnung der im 19. Bundestag erstmals vertretenen Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) nach deren Spaltung im Frühsommer 2015. Die AfD wird von den Experten auf allen Dimensionen als rechtskonservative Partei wahrgenommen wird. Fragebogen und Daten werden online zur Verfügung gestellt (Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/22BGVU), Durchschnittswerte der ermittelten Parteipositionen und parteispezifischen Salienzen der berücksichtigten Politikdimensionen finden sich im Anhang zu diesem Beitrag.
The process of coalition formation following the 2017 Bundestag election was the most difficult in German post-war history. For the first time Germany saw negotiations fail, a minority government being discussed as a real possibility, and the federal president involved as formateur in coalition politics. The aim of this contribution is to explain why government formation was so intricate after the 2017 election. To this end, we trace patterns of party politics and the development of the German party system since 2013. We then study general patterns of government formation at the regional and national levels since the 1990s and evaluate whether these have changed with the advent of the right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany. Our analysis of the 2017–18 government formation process is based on a novel expert survey of the policy profiles of German parties on various issue dimensions, conducted in 2017. The results show that the continuation of the incumbent coalition government of Christian and Social Democrats was the most likely outcome, and that the Social Democrats were indeed able to enforce a surpassing share of their policy positions in the final negotiation rounds.
Studies show that globalisation creates political potentials that can transform electoral competition in Western societies. The specific process of how these potentials become effective is not completely understood. It is argued in the article that attention-grabbing events can trigger the transformation of electoral competition as they force actors to take clear positions and thereby allow citizens to align their partisan preferences and policy attitudes. The article analyses the case of German parties’ reaction to the arrival of large numbers of refugees at Europe’s borders in 2015/16. Using panel data that bracket this event, it is shown how German citizens responded to party behaviour by changing partisan preferences on the basis of prior immigration attitudes. The so-called refugee crisis may thus have been a critical juncture transforming party competition in Germany. As such, the crisis represents a striking example of how events may focus attention on a new policy dimension and catalyse the evolution of new cleavages.
Dieses Buch thematisiert die Herausforderung, mit der sich die Politik in Deutschland nach der Aufnahme einer historisch hohen Zahl von Flüchtlingen und in der Folge mit der Frage der Integration dieser Menschen in die Gesellschaft konfrontiert sieht. Die Rahmenbedingungen und Charakteristika des Regierens in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft werden entlang der fünf Themenfelder Politikmanagement, Parteien und Willensbildung, Wahlen und Wählen, wissenschaftliche Politikberatung und politische Bildung sowie Sprache und politische Kommunikation mit verschiedenen disziplinären Ansätzen diskutiert. Die Impulse mit ihren unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln schärfen das Verständnis für die anstehenden Herausforderung und skizzieren mögliche Lösungsansätze.
Der Inhalt
Politikmanagement in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft.- Parteien und Willensbildung im Spiegel der Integrationsdebatte.- Die Integrationsdebatte als Wahlkampfthema.- Wissenschaftliche Politikberatung und Politische Bildung zur Einwanderung.- Die Sprache der Einwanderungspolitik
Die Zielgruppen
Studierende, Lehrende und Wissenschaftler der Politikwissenschaft
Politikerinnen und Politiker
Journalistinnen und Journalisten
Die Herausgeber
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Christoph Bieber (Welker-Stiftungsprofessor für Ethik in Politikmanagement und Gesellschaft), Univ.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte (Professor für Public Policy und Landespolitik), Univ.-Prof. Dr. Karl-Rudolf Korte (Professor für das Politische System der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und moderne Staatstheorien / Direktor der NRW School of Governance / Dekan der Fakultät für Gesellschaftswissenschaften), Dr. Niko Switek (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) gehören der NRW School of Governance und dem Institut für Politikwissenschaft an der Universität Duisburg-Essen an.
Recent election outcomes in Europe and beyond reflect a growing scepticism of open borders among the public. From the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom to the election of Donald Trump in the United States, rhetoric that is critical of the organizations facilitating policy co-operation and learning across borders as well as international trade and migration is popular among a growing segment of the electorate. Are these recent developments part of a larger trend of party and electoral change? By focusing on changing patterns in party and electoral competition in the Netherlands, this article suggests that they are. Relying on expert and voter data, it argues that party and electoral politics in the Netherlands are increasingly characterized by both an economic left–right as well as a cosmopolitan–parochial divide. While the former relates to issues of state intervention into the economy, the second refers to stances on European integration, migration and national control in international affairs. This cosmopolitan–parochial divide has become largely independent of the economic left–right dimension, and influences people’s voting decisions independently of their left–right views. Interestingly, the cosmopolitan–parochial divide in the Netherlands should not necessarily be understood as a cultural backlash, but rather seems a reflection of increased economic insecurity. Although the evidence stems from the Dutch case, I suggest that the cosmopolitan–parochial divide is a useful lens through which we can understand political change in Europe more generally.
Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über den sozialpsychologischen Ansatz der Michigan-Schule und die zugehörige Forschung. Das Grundmodell aus Parteiidentifikation, Kandidaten- und Issueorientierung sowie Weiterentwicklungen werden dargestellt und diskutiert. Anschließend werden die drei zentralen Modellbestandteile im Detail behandelt. Konzept, Messung, Erwerb und Wirkungen der Parteiidentifikation werden ebenso dargestellt wie auf diesem Konzept aufsetzende Makrokonzepte wie Dealignment und Realignment. Das Issue-Konzept und Issue-Typen werden vorgestellt, Bedingungen des Issue-Wählens identifiziert und empirische Befunde zu sachfragenorientiertem Wahlverhalten diskutiert. Die Entstehung und verschiedene Arten von Kandidatenorientierungen werden behandelt und deren Wirkungen auf Wahlverhalten diskutiert.
Schlagworte: sozialpsychologisches Modell; Michigan-Modell; Parteiidentifikation; Dealignment; Issues; Sachfragen; Kandidaten; Personalisierung.
Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über soziologisch orientierte Analysen von Wahlverhalten. Es werden der mikro- und der makrosoziologische Erklärungsansatz dargestellt und diskutiert. Auf dieser Grundlage wird ein verallgemeinertes Modell zur Erklärung von Zusammenhängen zwischen soziodemographischen Merkmalen und Wahlverhalten formuliert. Im zweiten Teil werden ausführlich empirische Befunde zur Bedeutung von sozialer Schicht und Klasse einerseits und Religion und Konfession andererseits für das Wahlverhalten in Deutschland und anderen Demokratien dargestellt und diskutiert.
Schlagworte: mikrosoziologischer Ansatz; makrosoziologischer Ansatz; cleavage; class voting; Religionswählen; homo sociologicus; soziale Milieus; cross-pressures.
On the occasion of the Federal Election 2009, Germany experienced a drastic decline in turnout. In 2013, the most recent Federal Election, turnout was thus a political issue hotly debated in the media and the Social Democrats ran an explicit non-voter campaign. Nevertheless, turnout rates remained at a low level, and the election resulted in the second lowest turnout in the entire history of post-war Germany. At the same time the SPD, one of the traditionally cleavage-based parties in Germany, suffered equally dramatic losses in terms of electoral support in 2009 from which it did not recover in the succeeding election. While the sudden decline of the vote share of a cleavage-based party may cast doubt on previous findings of a relative stability of cleavage voting in Germany, the almost parallel decline in turnout points to a blind spot in the cleavage voting literature. This research has focused exclusively on the role of social cleavages in shaping choices between parties, and thus has neglected the possibility that cleavages erode due to a decline in electoral mobilisation of cleavage groups. The present article looks at the long-term and short-term changes in party choice and turnout in the social groups that traditionally formed the constituency of the main cleavage parties, the SPD and the CDU/CSU. In doing so, the article also examines whether and how these changes in party vote and electoral participation are related to cohort and period effects. Empirically, we show that a decline in the support for the SPD among the working class consists of both long-term and short-term components, but it does not lead to vote defection yet mostly to abstention from voting. Further it shows that the CDU/CSU is unaffected by the mobilisation problems that plague Social Democracy in Germany. However, first long-term effects are visible across birth cohorts. Younger core religious groups are increasingly opting for other parties.
Since the formation of the German AfD in spring 2013, political scientists have discussed whether the AfD can be classified as a populist party. Despite the split of the party in summer 2015 leading to this characterisation becoming uncontested, the question remains whether the AfD was populist from its inception. This article demonstrates that distinguishing between the tactical and strategic agendas of the party solves this conundrum. While the AfD seldom applied populist discourse in its official manifestos, its tactical agenda was undoubtedly framed by populism. Ironically, it has been the ideologically moderate economist wing that has applied populist discourse in combination with its critique of the euro.
Is the success of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) a protest phenomenon or the mobilization of a political potential? We test both hypotheses on the grounds of the German National Election Study 2013. The analysis reveals that disenchantment with party politics is indeed relatively high among the AfD voters. However, they also hold homogenous positions on the most relevant issues. Moreover, these positions have a significant
impact on the vote choice for the AfD, even when we control for voters’ disenchantment with party politics. This supports the idea of the party’s success being rooted in the mobilization of a neglected political potential rather than just being a protest phenomenon.
In this study, we examine the role of social trust as an individual and a neighborhood-level determinant for radical right-wing populist party preferences. We argue that high social trust decreases radical right-wing populist party preferences and that this relationship is essentially mediated by negative attitudes toward immigrants. Using data from the Netherlands’ Life Course Study, we employ multilevel structural equation modeling to test our argument on support for the Party for Freedom (PVV). The results reveal that individual social trust decreases radical right-wing populist party preferences. Beyond the micro-level relationship, we find that neighborhood social trust decreases radical right-wing populist party preferences. In either case, the effects are mediated by anti-immigrant sentiments. Our findings provide evidence for the importance of social trust as a multilevel construct in explanations for radical right-wing populist party preferences.
The welfare states of the affluent democracies now stand at the centre of political discussion and social conflict. In this book, which grew out of two conferences held at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, in November 1997 and October 1998, an international team of leading analysts reject simplistic claims about the impact of economic ‘globalization’. Whilst accepting that economic, demographic, and social pressures on the welfare state are very real, they argue that many of the most fundamental challenges have little to do with globalization. In contrast to many popular accounts, the authors detect few signs of a convergence of national social policies towards an American‐style lowest common denominator. The contemporary politics of the welfare state takes shape against a backdrop of both intense pressures for austerity and enduring popularity. Thus, in most of the affluent democracies, the politics of social policy centre on the renegotiation, restructuring, and modernization of the post‐war social contract rather than its dismantling. The authors examine a wide range of countries and public policy arenas, including health care, pensions, and labour markets. They demonstrate how different national settings affect whether, and on what terms, centrist efforts to restructure the welfare state can succeed. The 13 chapters of the book are arranged in four main sections, each with three chapters, and a concluding section: I. Sources of Pressure on the Contemporary Welfare State; II. Adjustment Dynamics: Economic Actors and Systems of Interest Intermediation; III. Adjustment Dynamics: Parties, Elections, and Political Institutions; IV. Comparing Policy Domains; and V. Conclusions.
The economic voting literature has been dominated by the incumbency-oriented hypothesis, in which voters reward or punish governments at the ballot box according to the nation's economic performance. The alternative (policy-oriented) hypothesis, in which voters favor parties that are closest to their issue position(s), has been neglected in this literature. This article explores policy voting with respect to an archetypal economic policy issue—unemployment. Voters who favor lower unemployment should tend to vote for left parties, since they “own” the issue. Examining a large time-series cross-sectional pool of Western European nations, this study finds some evidence for economic policy voting. However, it is conditioned by incumbency. According to varied tests, left incumbents experience a net electoral cost if the unemployment rate climbs. Incumbency, then, serves to break any natural economic policy advantage that might accrue to the left due to the issue of unemployment.
How do Americans organize their political beliefs? This article argues that party polarization and the growing prominence of moral issues in recent decades have catalyzed different responses by different groups of Americans. The article investigates systematic heterogeneity in the organization of political attitudes using relational class analysis, a graph-based method for detecting multiple patterns of opinion in survey data. Three subpopulations, each characterized by a distinctive way of organizing its political beliefs, are identified: ideologues, whose political attitudes strongly align with either liberal or conservative categories; alternatives, who are instead morally conservative but economically liberal, or vice versa; and agnostics, who exhibit weak associations between political beliefs. Individuals' sociodemographic profiles, partic- ularly their income, education, and religiosity, lie at the core of the different ways in which they understand politics. Results show that while ideologues have gone through a process of issue alignment, alternatives have grown increasingly apart from the political agendas of both parties. The conflictual presence of conservative and liberal preferences has often been resolved by alternative voters in favor of the Republican Party.
Margalit, Yotam. (2012) Lost in Globalization: International Economic Integration and the Sources of Popular Discontent. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2478.2012.00747.x © 2012 International Studies Association
What are the sources of popular opposition to economic globalization? A common answer in the literature is the adverse impact of trade liberalization on some people’s labor market standing and earning prospects. Recent studies also note a correlation between nationalist and ethnocentric sentiments and support for trade protectionism, yet do not test whether these non-economic sentiments are actually a cause of the opposition to freer trade. I argue that many individuals fear not only the oft-cited material consequences of trade openness, but also what they perceive to be its social and cultural consequences. I use cross-national survey data and a survey experiment to test this causal claim. The argument also helps explain why less-educated individuals are consistently more apprehensive about international economic integration than more educated individuals, even in the countries in which economic theory predicts otherwise. The findings have implications for the debate over the policy tools for compensating globalization’s losers and sustaining popular support for further economic integration.
The Great Recession that started in 2007/2008 has been the worst economic downturn since the crisis of the 1930s in Europe. It led to a major sovereign debt crisis, which is arguably the biggest challenge for the European Union (EU) and its common currency. Not since the 1950s have advanced democracies experienced such a dramatic external imposition of austerity and structural reform policies through inter- or supranational organisations such as the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or as implicitly requested by international financial markets. Did this massive interference with the room for maneuver of parliaments and governments in many countries erode support for national democracy in the crisis since 2007? Did citizens realise that their national democratic institutions were no longer able to effectively decide on major economic and social policies, on economic and welfare state institutions? And did they react by concluding that this constrained democracy no longer merited further support? These are the questions guiding this article, which compares 26 EU countries in 2007–2011 and re-analyses 78 national surveys. Aggregate data from these surveys is analysed in a time-series cross-section design to examine changes in democratic support at the country level. The hypotheses also are tested at the individual level by estimating a series of cross-classified multilevel logistic regression models. Support for national democracy – operationalised as satisfaction with the way democracy works and as trust in parliament – declined dramatically during the crisis. This was caused both by international organisations and markets interfering with national democratic procedures and by the deteriorating situation of the national economy as perceived by individual citizens.
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, new parties will find it difficult to establish themselves. Second, the positions of the established actors with respect to the new cultural divide that the extreme populist right mobilizes may be crucial. This article systematizes the various explanations regarding the impact of mainstream party positions on the electoral fortunes of the extreme right, and develops two new hypotheses that differentiate between the conditions that favor the entry of the extreme right, and its subsequent success. The various hypotheses are then tested in an empirical analysis of election campaigns in France and Germany, combining data on party positions as reflected in the news media with mass-level surveys. The results show that the diverging behavior of the established parties, rather than the strength of the traditional state-market cleavage, explains the differences between these two countries. More specifically, the differing strategy of the mainstream left in the two contexts has allowed the Front National to anchor itself in the French party system, whereas similar parties have not achieved a breakthrough in Germany.
From Stokes's (1963) early critique on, it has been clear to empirical researchers that the traditional spatial theory of elections is seriously flawed. Yet fully a quarter century later, that theory remains the dominant paradigm for understanding mass-elite linkage in politics. We present an alternative spatial theory of elections that we argue has greater empirical verisimilitude.
Based on the ideas of symbolic politics, the directional theory assumes that most people have a diffuse preference for a certain direction of policy-making and that people vary in the intensity with which they hold those preferences. We test the two competing theories at the individual level with National Election Study data and find the directional theory more strongly supported than the traditional spatial theory. We then develop the implications of the directional theory for candidate behavior and assess the predictions in light of evidence from the U.S. Congress.
1. Modeling party competition 2. How voters decide: the components of the unified theory of voting 3. Linking voter choice to party strategies: illustrating the role of non-policy factors 4. Factors influencing the link between party strategy and the variables 5. Policy competition under the unified theory: empirical applications to the 1988 French Presidential Election 6. Policy competition under the unified voting model: empirical applications to the 1989 Norwegian parliamentary election 7. The threat of abstention: candidate strategies and policy representation in US presidential elections 8. Candidate strategies with voter abstention in US presidential elections: 1980, 1984, 1988, 1996, and 2000 9. Policy competition in Britain: the 1997 general election 10. The consequences of voter projection: assimilation and contrast effects 11. Policy-seeking motivations of parties in two-party elections: theory 12. Policy-seeking motivations of parties in two-party elections: empirical analysis 13. Concluding remarks.
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.
Based on Allbus data, stability and change of the impact of social structurally defined interests on party preference in Germany is investigated. We use both traditional cleavage indicators like union membership or frequency of church attendance and further social structural characteristics like class identification, occupation or unemployment experience. We apply a two-level model with varying intercepts for the 16 Allbus surveys from 1980 to 2008.
Beyond the expected results we observe some deviations from the stable relationship between social structural variables and party preference. (1) The younger generation of active Catholics prefers the Christian Democrats less than the older cohorts and the East German working class leaned towards this party immediately after unification. (2) Union members got alienated from the Social Democrats since 2004 due to reforms of unemployment benefits for people being out of work for a longer period of time with the consequence that Die Linke could profit from this trend in West and East Germany. (3) This left socialist party and its forerunner, the PDS, has always been the preferred party of people with unemployment experience. (4) The Greens and the Liberal Party are enduringly supported by specific social groups, the Greens by the social and cultural service class and the FDP by the self-employed, at least since this latter party ended the social liberal coalition with the SPD in 1982.
Subjektiv empfundene Sympathien der Wähler gegenüber politischen Akteuren wie Parteien und insbesondere deren Spitzenkandidaten
gelten in der Öffentlichkeit und in den Medien als ein zentraler Faktor, der das Zustandekommen von Wahlergebnissen erklärt
(vgl. Gabriel/Keil 2007: 363). So war das allgemeine Medienecho nach den Landtagswahlen vom Januar 2008, dass das schlechte
Abschneiden der hessischen Christdemokraten unter Ministerpräsident Roland Koch maßgeblich mit dessen negativen Sympathiewerten
zusammenhing, wohingegen die geringeren Verluste der CDU in Niedersachsen und Hamburg nicht nur den weniger polarisierenden
Wahlkämpfen der Union in beiden Bundesländern zugeschrieben wurden, sondern auch den bei den Wählern als wesentlich sympathischer
empfundenen amtierenden Regierungschefs Christian Wulff und Ole von Beust (vgl. z.B. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung vom 21.
Februar 2008: 4 und vom 26. Februar 2008: 5; Süddeutsche Zeitung vom 26. Februar 2008: 6).
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 collected data on election campaigns. The authors argue that, as a result of structural transformations and the strategic repositioning of political parties, Europe has observed the emergence of a tripolar configuration of political power, comprising the left, the moderate right, and the new populist right. They suggest that, through an emphasis on cultural issues such as mass immigration and resistance to European integration, the traditional focus of political debate - the economy - has been downplayed or reinterpreted in terms of this new political cleavage. This new analysis of Western European politics will interest all students of European politics and political sociology.
Winner of the American Political Science Association's 1996 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. The rise of new political competitors on the radical right is a central feature of many contemporary European party systems. The first study of its kind based on a wide array of comparative survey data, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis provides a unifying framework to explain why rightist parties are electorally powerful in some countries but not in others. The book argues that changes in social structure and the economy do not by themselves adequately explain the success of extremist parties. Instead we must look to the competitive struggles among parties, their internal organizational patterns, and their long-term ideological traditions to understand the principles governing their success. Radical right authoritarian parties tend to emerge when moderate parties converge toward the median voter. But the success of these parties depends on the strategy employed by the right-wing political actors. Herbert Kitschelt's in-depth analysis, based on the experiences of rightist parties in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Britain, reveals that the broadest appeal is enjoyed by parties that couple a fierce commitment to free markets with authoritarian, ethnocentric--or even racist--messages. The author also shows how a country's particular political constituency or its intellectual and organizational legacies may allow right-wing parties to diverge from these norms and still find electoral success. The book concludes by exploring the interaction between the development of the welfare state, cultural pluralization through immigrants, and the growth of the extreme right. Herbert Kitschelt is Professor of Political Science at both Duke University and Humboldt University, Berlin. Anthony McGann is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Duke University.
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Simon Bornschier und Timotheos Frey
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