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Anti-Establishment-Politik und die Wandlung des deutschen Parteienraums
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Zusammenfassung
Die Unterstützung der Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) im Vorfeld der Bundestagswahl 2017 wird unter Bezugnahme auf den Forschungsstand zu älteren Rechtsparteien in Deutschland analysiert. Auf der Grundlage einer Auswertung der Vorwahl-Querschnittstudie der Deutschen Nationalen Wahlstudie (GLES) kann gezeigt werden, dass auch die AfD in erster Linie von Personen unterstützt wird, die sich politisch rechts einstufen und gleichzeitig politikverdrossen sind. Eine Besonderheit der AfD besteht im Vergleich zu den älteren Rechtsparteien allerdings darin, dass es ihr gelingt, auch nennenswerte Anteile der Politikverdrossenen aus der politischen Mitte und dem gemäßigten linken Lager zu mobilisieren. Aufgrund der methodischen Probleme bei der Identifikation von Interaktionseffekten im Rahmen logistischer Regressionsanalysen erfolgen die empirischen Analysen mit dem Segmentationsalgorithmus CHAID. Darüber hinaus wird gezeigt, dass das Konzept des Rechtspopulismus inhaltliche Widersprüche aufweist und bei der empirischen Analyse der Unterstützung der AfD keine zusätzliche Erklärungskraft generiert. Abschließend wird die besondere Bedeutung Angela Merkels für die Entstehung von Politikverdrossenheit und damit auch für die Unterstützung der AfD herausgearbeitet.
Building on the spatial model of party competition, we investigate the structure of political conflict in German subnational politics. Little research has examined the conflict dimensionality at the Länder level. Moreover, the few studies which have done so predominantly rely on a deductive approach that pre-structures the conflict space using presumed conflict dimensions. In this paper, we put these dimensionality assumptions to the test with an inductive approach that capitalizes on parties’ preference expressions in vote advice applications. We circumvent the common concern that data from vote advice applications is too sparse for assessing political conflict structures by estimating a space that bridges multiple elections. Unlike previous research, we find that political conflict is defined by a comprehensive left-right dimension and a secondary dimension separating mainstream parties from fringe competitors. This anti-establishment dimension is characterized by diverging preferences over democratic institutions and policies considered consensual among the political mainstream.
We have recently witnessed a considerable interest in the estimation of party preferences from vote advice applications (VAAs). Such attempts have been met with some skepticism. One of the principal concerns is the effect of the item selection on the resulting spaces in scaling analyses. The items are said to introduce an implicit weighting, such that the estimated spaces may or may not be indicative of party competition. We assess the severity of this issue by employing explicit weighting schemes based on external sources. Three such sources for calibrating VAAs are proposed and subsequently tested using data from the 2017 German Wahl-O-Mat. We show that the position estimates are remarkably stable. Moreover, the item count in ordinary VAAs is sufficiently large to ensure robust position estimates.
This article addresses the variation of anti-corruption and anti-elite salience in party positioning across Europe. It demonstrates that while anti-corruption salience is primarily related to the (regional) context in which a party operates, anti-elite salience is primarily a function of party ideology. Extreme left and extreme conservative (TAN) parties are significantly more likely to emphasize anti-elite views. Through its use of the new 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey wave, this article also introduces the dataset.
Recent cross-national comparative studies have found no effect of countries’ macroeconomic performances on trust in national political institutions, once political explanations (most notably corruption) are taken into account. Although political trust is not determined by the comparison of national economic performance to other countries, it is argued in this article that it is affected by comparisons to their own past performance. In a multilevel, fixed effects analysis of Eurobarometer data (21 waves in 15 European Union Member States between 1999 and 2011) the extent to which within-country variations in economic performance affect political trust longitudinally is tested. Three major conclusions are reached. First, within-country, longitudinal changes in performance (growth, deficits, unemployment and inflation) affect political trust. Second, the impact of macroeconomic performance is stronger among the lower educated. Third, even in times of economic duress, budgetary deficits tend to undermine political trust.
The sudden and perhaps unexpected appearance of populist parties in the 1990s shows no sign of immediately vanishing. The lion's share of the research on populism has focused on defining populism, on the causes for its rise and continued success, and more recently on its influence on government and on public policy. Less research has, however, been conducted on measuring populist attitudes among voters. In this article, we seek to fill this gap by measuring populist attitudes and to investigate whether these attitudes can be linked with party preferences. We distinguish three political attitudes: (1) populist attitudes, (2) pluralist attitudes, and (3) elitist attitudes. We devise a measurement of these attitudes and explore their validity by way of using a principal component analysis on a representative Dutch data set (N = 600). We indeed find three statistically separate scales of political attitudes. We further validated the scales by testing whether they are linked to party preferences and find that voters who score high on the populist scale have a significantly higher preference for the Dutch populist parties, the Party for Freedom, and the Socialist Party.
This article assesses the impact of populist radical right parties on national party systems in Western Europe. Has the emergence of this new party family changed the interaction of party competition within Western European countries? First, I look at party system change with regard to numerical and numerical-ideological terms. Second, I evaluate the effect populist radical right parties have had on the different dimensions of party systems. Third, I assess the claim that the rise of populist radical right parties has created bipolarizing party system. Fourth, I look at the effect the rise of the populist radical right has had on the logic of coalition formation. The primary conclusion is that, irrespective of conceptualization and operationalization, populist radical right parties have not fundamentally changed party systems in Western Europe.
What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a study of national and European electoral campaigns, protest events and public debates in six West European countries. While the mobilization of the losers of the processes of globalization by new right populist parties is seen to be the driving force of the restructuring of West European politics, the book goes beyond party politics. It attempts to show how the cleavage coalitions that are shaping up under the impact of globalization extend to state actors, interest groups and social movement organizations, and how the new conflicts are framed by the various actors involved.
This article reports on the 2010 Chapel Hill expert surveys (CHES) and introduces the CHES trend file, which contains measures of national party positioning on European integration, ideology and several European Union (EU) and non-EU policies for 1999−2010. We examine the reliability of expert judgments and cross-validate the 2010 CHES data with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project and the 2009 European Elections Studies survey, and explore basic trends on party positioning since 1999. The dataset is available at the CHES website.
Roll-call votes are important tools for legislative studies. They serve as an empirical foundation for many insights about the causes of party unity and the dominant lines of political conflict. In light of their importance surprisingly little is known about the causes behind the varying frequency of recorded votes across parliaments. This article presents a comprehensive model explaining the different supply of recorded votes as a function of their saliency in the political competition between goal-seeking party groups. Drawing on an original dataset covering 109 electoral terms of all 16 sub-national parliaments in Germany (Landtage) the influence of different variables on the frequency of recorded votes is tested. The results show a significant impact of the electoral system, political polarisation, the presence of ‘outsider’ parties in the legislature, the margin of the government's majority and voting technology.
How is contestation on European integration structured among national political parties? Are issues arising from European integration assimilated into existing dimensions of domestic contestation? We show that there is a strong relationship between the conventional left/right dimension and party positioning on European integration. However, the most powerful source of variation in party support is the new politics dimension, ranging from Green/alternative/libertarian to Traditional/authoritarian/nationalist.
A new and wide-ranging empirical overview of party policy in 47 modern democracies, including all of the new democracies of Eastern Europe. It updates and radically extends Policy and Party Competition (1992), which established itself as a key mainstream data source for all political scientists exploring the policy positions of political parties. This essential text is divided into three clear parts: Part I introduces the study, themes and methodology Part II deals in depth with the wide range of issues involved in estimating and analyzing the policy positions of key political actors. Part III is the key data section that identifies key policy dimensions across the 47 countries, detailing their party positions and median legislators, and is complemented by graphical representations of each party system. This book is an invaluable reference for all political scientists, particularly those interested in party policy and comparative politics.
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 develop a Bayesian procedure for estimation and inference for spatial models of roll call voting. Our approach is extremely flexible, applicable to any legislative setting, irrespective of size, the extremism of the legislative voting histories, or the number of roll calls available for analysis. Our model is easily extended to let other sources of information inform the analysis of roll call data, such as the number and nature of the underlying dimensions, the presence of party whipping, the determinants of legislator preferences, or the evolution of the legislative agenda; this is especially helpful since generally it is inappropriate to use estimates of extant methods (usually generated under assumptions of sincere voting) to test models embodying alternate assumptions (e.g., log-rolling). A Bayesian approach also provides a coherent framework for estimation and inference with roll call data that eludes extant methods; moreover, via Bayesian simulation methods, it is straightforward to generate uncertainty assessments or hypothesis tests concerning any auxiliary quantity of interest or to formally compare models. In a series of examples we show how our method is easily extended to accommodate theoretically interesting models of legislative behavior. Our goal is to move roll call analysis away from pure measurement or description towards a tool for testing substantive theories of legislative behavior.
We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and Ireland, on both economic and social policy dimensions. We "export" the method to a non-English-language environment, analyzing the policy positions of German parties, including the PDS as it entered the former West German party system. Finally, we extend its application beyond the analysis of party manifestos, to the estimation of political positions from legislative speeches. Our "language-blind" word scoring technique successfully replicates published policy estimates without the substantial costs of time and labor that these require. Furthermore, unlike in any previous method for extracting policy positions from political texts, we provide uncertainty measures for our estimates, allowing analysts to make informed judgments of the extent to which differences between two estimated policy positions can be viewed as significant or merely as products of measurement error.
Given the increasingly polarized nature of American politics, renewed attention has been focused on the ideological nature of the mass public. Using Bayesian Item Response Theory (IRT), we examine the contemporary contours of policy attitudes as they relate to ideological identity and we consider the implications for the way scholars conceptualize, measure, and use political ideology in empirical research. Although political rhetoric today is clearly organized by a single ideological dimension, we find that the belief systems of the mass public remain multidimensional, with many in the electorate holding liberal preferences on one dimension and conservative preferences on another. These cross-pressured individuals tend to self-identify as moderate (or say “Don't Know”) in response to the standard liberal-conservative scale, thereby jeopardizing the validity of this commonly used measure. Our analysis further shows that failing to account for the multidimensional nature of ideological preferences can produce inaccurate predictions about the voting behavior of the American public.
This article critically reviews the intersectional locus of public opinion scholarship and immigration studies that make use of data from multinational survey projects. Specifically, it emphasizes current cross-national research seeking to understand the causes, manifestations, and implications of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration in economically advanced countries of the world. Despite rapid expansion, the field suffers from several methodological challenges and theoretical constraints. A succinct exposure of trends and patterns is followed by presentations of influential theoretical perspectives and established individual- and contextual-level determinants. The review suggests that strengthening the conceptual apparatus and enlarging the analytical focus are priorities. It concludes with some observations on how to circumvent these problems and to bridge current research with future explorations of the embedded nature of such public attitudes.
Dieser Beitrag untersucht den Einfluss eines populistischen Demokratieverständnisses auf die Wahl populistischer Parteien anhand des Falls der „Alternative für Deutschland“ (AfD). Im Anschluss an dominierende Populismusdefinitionen machen wir ein populistisches Demokratieverständnis an drei Elementen fest – der Priorisierung des Mehrheitswillens gegenüber Minderheitenschutz, der Forderung nach unbedingter Responsivität von Repräsentanten gegenüber dem Mehrheitswillen sowie einer ablehnenden Haltung gegenüber politischem Pluralismus – und entwickeln ein entsprechendes Messmodell. Unsere empirische Analyse zeigt, dass populistische Demokratiekonzeptionen bei Anhängern der AfD besonders häufig auftreten. Sie haben zudem auch in multivariaten Analysen einen deutlichen Einfluss auf die Wahlpräferenz für die AfD und sind, unter Ausnutzung der Panelstruktur des Datensatzes, in der Lage zu prognostizieren, welche Individuen ihre Wahlpräferenz in Richtung AfD geändert haben.
Unterscheidet sich die nordrhein-westfalische CDU eines Jurgen Ruttgers programmatisch von der hessischen Union unter Fuhrung von Roland Koch? Steht die SPD im Saarland weiter links von der Mitte als die Sozialdemokraten im benachbarten Rheinland-Pfalz? Wenn ja, warum ist das der Fall? Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die bundeslandsspezifischen Eigenheiten des Parteienwettbewerbs anhand einer Analyse aller zwischen 1990 und 2010 verfassten Landtagswahlprogramme. Dies geschieht vor dem Hintergrund der historischen Entwicklung der Parteiensysteme in den Landern einerseits und auf Grundlage theoretischer Modelle andererseits. Die Ergebnisse zeichnen ein differenziertes Bild des Parteienwettbewerbs im deutschen Mehrebenensystem. Sie zeigen die Unterschiede in den programmatischen Positionen der Parteien in den verschiedenen Politikfeldern auf, die ihre Ursachen in der Sozialstruktur der jeweiligen Wahlerschaft, aber auch in taktischen Bestrebungen der Parteien bei Landtagswahlen haben. Die Eigenstandigkeit des regionalen Parteienwettbewerbs im Vergleich zum bundespolitischen zeigt sich schlieslich in der Bedeutung der inhaltlichen Ausrichtungen der Landesparteien fur die Regierungsbildung in den Bundeslandern.
This book contends that beneath the frenzied activism of the sixties and the seeming quiescence of the seventies, a "silent revolution" has been occurring that is gradually but fundamentally changing political life throughout the Western world. Ronald Inglehart focuses on two aspects of this revolution: a shift from an overwhelming emphasis on material values and physical security toward greater concern with the quality of life; and an increase in the political skills of Western publics that enables them to play a greater role in making important political decisions.
Von der Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland an war die FDP über drei Jahrzehnte lang die unangefochtene ‚dritte Kraft‘ im deutschen Parteiensystem. Ab den 1980er Jahren wurden die Grünen zur immer stärkeren Konkurrentin um die Schlüsselstellung im Parteiensystem und in den 1990er Jahren betrat die PDS die Bühne, die ab 2007 als Linkspartei zur gesamtdeutschen Konkurrenz von FDP und Grünen wurde. Mit dem besten Wahlergebnis ihrer Geschichte schien die FDP sich 2009 erneut als dritte Kraft zu etablieren, kurz darauf erlebte sie jedoch einen dramatischen Absturz, verfehlte bei der Wahl 2013 zum ersten Mal den Einzug in den Bundestag und erhielt danach nur noch eine marginale Wählerunterstützung. Der Beitrag analysiert diesen Weg von der dritten Kraft zur marginalen Partei, geht detailliert auf die personellen und inhaltlichen Gründe ein, die zu diesem Absturz geführt haben, und diskutiert die Zukunftsaussichten der Patei.
Die FDP wurde im Dezember 1948 als Zusammenschluss von liberalen Landesorganisationen aus den drei westlichen Besatzungszonen und Berlin gegründet. Der Versuch, eine gesamtdeutsche Partei (Demokratische Partei Deutschlands) zu gründen, war Anfang 1948 gescheitert, weil sich die Liberal-Demokratische Partei (LDP) der Sowjetzone unter ihrem Vorsitzenden W. Külz der von der SED (→ PDS-SED) gesteuerten Volkskongressbewegung anschloss. Der Heppenheimer Zusammenschluss der Westzonenparteien bedeutete organisatorisch die Überwindung der historischen Spaltung des liberalen Lagers in D. Gleichwohl besaßen die Landesverbände zunächst ein politisches und programmatisches Eigengewicht, die Bundespartei war ein „Kartell der Landesparteien“ (W. Stephan). Das Gewicht der Landesorganisationen gründete im Südwesten und in den Hansestädten für lange Zeit in einem spezifisch bürgerlich-liberalen Milieu des alten Mittelstandes. Die Landesverbände in Hess., NW und Nds. verstanden sich in der Anfangsphase als rechte Sammlungsparteien mit starken nationalliberalen Einfärbungen. Mit Beginn der sozialliberalen Regierungskoalition im Bund änderte sich das Erscheinungsbild der Partei. Sie wurde eine Regietangs- und Koalitionspartei, Koalitionspolitik und Regierungsteilhabe orientierten sich nahezu ausschließlich am bundespolitischen Muster. Gleichzeitig zeigte die Partei auf Länderebene eine zunehmende elektorale Labilität. Vor allem im Umfeld der Regierungswechsel von 1969 und 1982 wurde eine parlamentarische Schwäche in den Ländern offensichtlich. Einen absoluten Tiefstand erreichte die Partei in den Jahren 1982–84, in denen die FDP zeitweilig in sechs → Landtagen nicht mehr vertreten war.
Wie nach keiner anderen Bundestagswahl in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland tauchten 2005 die unterschiedlichsten möglichen Koalitionskonstellationen in der öffentlichen Diskussion auf: Da war von der „Ampel“ (SPD, FDP, Bündnis90/Grüne), von „Jamaika“ (CDU/CSU, FDP, Bündnis90/Grüne) oder eben der Großen Koalition aus CDU/CSU und SPD die Rede. Einzelne Journalisten und fuhrende Parteimitglieder wollten selbst die Bildung einer „rot-rot-grünen-Koalition“ mit SPD, Linkspartei/PDS und Bündnis90/Grüne nicht gänzlich ausschließen. Auf welchem Weg und aus welchen Gründen kam es schließlich zur Bildung der Großen Koalition? Der Beitrag untersucht theoretisch-konzeptionell und gestützt auf eine quantitativ wie qualitativ empirische Untersuchung der Wahlprogramme zur Bundestagswahl 2005, welche Konstellationen realpolitisch denkbar sind, erwägt Argumente und Erklärungsansätze für die Bildung der Großen Koalition sowie das NichtZustandekommen der anderen Optionen und zieht daraus Schlussfolgerungen für zukünftige Koalitionsbildungen wie für die Strukturen des Parteien-systems auf Bundesebene nach der Bundestagswahl 2005.
While many contributions on legislative politics in the European Parliament rely on recorded votes, the motivations behind the decision to record a vote remain somewhat arcane. This article frames roll-call vote requests as a minority right which offers party groups an opportunity to shape the voting agenda and signal commitment to a policy proposal. The analysis adds to our understanding of legislative behavior by linking the committee stage to the plenary stage. Party groups which do not support a floor proposal drafted by the lead committee are found to be more likely to request a roll-call vote in plenary. The quantitative evidence is supplemented by interview data which shed light both on the actors’ motivations and the internal decision-making processes preceding the decision to go on record.
Legislative politics scholars rely heavily on roll call vote (RCV) data. However, it has been claimed that strategic motives behind RCV requests lead to overestimating party group cohesion and, thus, biased findings on legislative behaviour. To explore this claim, we distinguish between two types of bias, a ‘behavioural bias’ and a ‘selection bias’. A recent rule change in the European Parliament, making RCVs mandatory on all final legislative votes, presents the unique opportunity to evaluate the latter. We compare party group cohesion in requested and mandatory RCVs by examining final legislative votes before and after the rule adoption using amendment RCVs (which still need to be requested) as a benchmark. The analysis shows that group cohesion is higher whenever RCVs are not just requested on
some
but mandatory on
all
votes. Hence, there is indeed a ‘selection bias’ in RCV data. Yet, somewhat contrary to former claims, relying on requested RCVs leads to underestimation of the cohesion party groups would have had were all votes automatically roll called. We argue that this is mainly because requests occur on more contentious votes.
Germany came relatively unscathed through the economic turbulence of recent years. For some observers, Germany is the biggest beneficiary of the Eurozone and the winner of the crisis. This begs the question of why, at the height of Germany’s post-war European influence, have an increasing number of Germans withdrawn their support from the European project? The Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) is Germany’s first Eurosceptic party to attract substantial electoral support in local, national and European elections. The article firstly presents a brief summary of the AfD’s European politics. It then traces the party’s ideological roots back to ordoliberal critiques of the Maastricht Treaty and argues that there was a deep scepticism towards European integration among Germany’s conservative elites well before the introduction of the Euro. The sudden surge in German Euroscepticism has to be understood within the context of broader cultural changes and a lack of political choice. An unprecedented moral panic about European bailouts and the European Central Bank’s monetary policy created a sense of emergency that paved the way for the AfD’s success.
Within less than two years of being founded by disgruntled members of the governing CDU, the newly formed Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has already performed extraordinarily well in the 2013 general election, the 2014 EP election, and a string of state elections. Highly unusually by German standards, it campaigned for an end to all efforts to save the euro and argued for a reconfiguration of Germany’s foreign policy. This seems to chime with the recent surge in far-right voting in Western Europe, and the AfD was subsequently described as right-wing populist and Europhobe.
Since the 1960s, new left-socialist or ecology parties have appeared in approximately half of the advanced Western democracies. These parties have a common set of egalitarian and libertarian tenets and appeal to younger, educated voters. The author uses macropolitical and economic data to explain the electoral success of these left-libertarian parties. While high levels of economic development are favorable preconditions for their emergence, they are best explained in terms of domestic political opportunity structures. There is little evidence that these parties are a reaction to economic and social crises in advanced democracies. The findings suggest that the rise of left-libertarian parties is the result of a new cleavage mobilized in democratic party systems rather than of transient protest.
This contribution aims, first, to determine whether support for the far right is based on perceptions of cultural or economic threats posed by immigrants in 11 European countries. Second, it seeks to reanalyze the question of whether class is an important explanation for support for the far right using new measures of class and, related to this, to determine the extent to which class interacts with perceived threat to explain support for far-right parties. The study reveals that perceived cultural ethnic threats are a stronger predictor of far-right preferences than are perceived economic ethnic threats. This cultural versus economic distinction is also depicted in social class differences in far-right preference. These are particularly evident between sociocultural specialists and technocrats, as anticipated by the new social class scheme. Sociocultural specialists particularly perceive fewer cultural ethnic threats compared to technocrats and consequently have a smaller likelihood to prefer the far right. On the contextual level, the authors find that higher levels of GDP in a country result in greater far-right preference, whereas higher levels of GDP do result in lower levels of ethnic threats. The effect of proportion of Muslims on far-right preference is nonsignificant. The study shows that the choice of countries in cross-national research can heavily influence the results.
Die Analyse politischer Konfliktlinien ist in der deutschen wie auch der internationalen Sozialwissenschaft immer noch von
einem zu wenig verbundenen Nebeneinander der Analyse gesellschaftlicher Konfliktlinien und ihrer Auswirkungen auf das Wahlverhalten
durch die Wahlforschung einerseits und der Analyse parteipolitischer Konfliktlinien und der daraus resultierenden Polarisierung
des Parteiensystems durch die Parteienforschung andererseits geprägt. Im Folgenden soll ein Beitrag zur stärkeren Integration
der Forschungslandschaft in diesem Bereich geleistet werden, indem die verschiedenen Ansätze zur theoretischen Konzeptualisierung
von gesellschaftlichen und parteipolitischen Konfliktlinien diskutiert und aufeinander bezogen werden.
The plurality of conflicting worldviews that are now found in the Western advanced industrial democracies has created values and belief systems that are markedly at odds with each other, which in turn has projected a whole new set of new politics or culture war issues onto the political agenda. The authors have empirically identified an authoritarian-libertarian dimension of value change that captures an important dimension of this shift. They demonstrate that the shift from authoritarian to libertarian values is related to (a) growing levels of social and political alienation along a number of key attitudinal dimensions; (b) a dramatic shift in positions on the key culture wars issues; and (c) higher participatory levels and more assertive modes of political involvement, yielding asymmetric mobilization around the culture wars issues. The study is based on the 1990 wave of the World Values Survey in the 12 largest and most affluent Western nations.
Since the 1960s, political scientists have debated the continued relevance of the left-right vocabulary for structuring policy choices and party affiliation in the mass publics of modern democracies. With the rise of “new politics” and “left-libertarian” movements and parties that try to redefine the political agenda of advanced democracies this issue has gained additional interest. In this article we first present four theories about the decline, persistence, transformation, or pluralization of the meaning new politics activists give to the left-right language. Then we explore how new politics activists in the Belgian ecology parties Agalev and Ecolo construct the meaning of left and right. For ecology party militants, this terminology still has an economic meaning, yet also gains a cultural significance that relates to the choice between a modern, highly centralized, and differentiated society and efforts to create a postmodern, decentralized, and more communitarian social order. Thus our data support the argument of pluralization theory that the meaning of left and right becomes multidimensional.
A basic level of trust in the political system is considered to be the cornerstone of modern-day democracy. Consequently, scholars and politicians have been concerned with low or declining levels of trust in political institutions. This article focuses on trust in parliament. Many theories have been offered to explain cross-national differences or longitudinal changes in trust, but they have not been subject to systematic empirical tests. This article aims to fill that theoretical and empirical gap. I conceptualize trust in parliament as citizens’ rather rational evaluations of the state—citizen relationship along four dimensions: competence, intrinsic care, accountability, and reliability. Next, I relate state characteristics to each of these four aspects, and hypothesize how they might affect political trust. These hypotheses are tested simultaneously by multi-level analysis on stapled data from the European Social Survey 2002—06. The tests show that three factors explain very well the cross-national differences in trust: corruption, the electoral system, and former regime type. Somewhat surprisingly, economic performance is not related to trust in parliament. Although the analyses do not explain changes in trust across time very well, they at least dismiss some of the existing explanations.
Points for practitioners
This article describes to what extent levels of trust in parliament differ across countries and change across time, and tests several explanations for comparatively low or longitudinally declining levels of trust. It offers practitioners a theoretical approach to make sense of trust issues by distinguishing four trust aspects. Moreover, it shows that objective state characteristics are crucial in explaining cross-national differences. Widespread perceptions of corruption are most harmful to trust in parliament, while democratic rule and a proportional electoral system are beneficial. Equally important, actual economic performance is unrelated to trust. Institutional designs that emphasize care and integrity appear to be more beneficial than ones that emphasize competence and performance.
The cleavage concept is a very demanding concept that limits the possibilities of finding any new examples of cleavages. And, indeed, many authors, some of whom contributing to the present volume, mainly perceive a decline of cleavages, or at best a stabilization of old cleavages, but hardly anything new. However, new cleavages may be hard to find, because we look in the wrong places for their structural basis: it might just be that their value/normative element is contributing crucially to the structural closure of the groups involved – as it did in the case of religion previously. If we take such a possibility into account, several of the contributions to the present volume provide evidence for the emergence of a new value-based cleavage, which has mainly, albeit not exclusively, been driven by the challengers of the New Left and the new populist right.
We consider the relationship between the preferences of American voters and the preferences of the U.S. legislators who represent them. Using an Internet-based, national opinion survey in conjunction with legislator voting records from the 109th and 110th Congresses, we show that members of Congress are more extreme than their constituents, i.e., that there is a lack of congruence between American voters and members of Congress. We also show that when a congressional legislator is replaced by a new member of the opposite party, one relative extremist is replaced by an opposing extremist. We call this leapfrog representation, a form of representation that leaves moderates with a dearth of representation in Congress. We see evidence of leapfrog representation in states and House districts and in the aggregate as well: the median member of the 109th House was too conservative compared to the median American voter, yet the median of the 110th House was too liberal. Thus, the median American voter was leapfrogged when the 109th House transitioned to the 110th. Although turnover between the 109th and 110th Senates occurred at approximately the same rate as between the 109th and 110th Houses, the Senate appears to be a more moderate institution whose median member does not move as abruptly as that of the House.
The theory of spatial voting has played a large role in the development of important results across many areas of political science. Directly testing the foundational assumptions of spatial voting theory, however, has not been possible with existing data. Using a novel survey design, this article obtains estimates of voter ideology on the same scale as candidate positions. The results of this scaling demonstrate that voters possess meaningful ideologies and, furthermore, that these beliefs are strongly related to the sorts of policy proposals considered in Congress. These ideology estimates are then used to uncover the actual relationships between ideology and vote choice for citizens of various types in the 2004 presidential election. Although the choices of independent voters are shown to be largely consistent with the assumptions of spatial voting theory, the decision rules used by partisans differ strongly from what unbiased spatial voting would imply. Although partisans do converge toward the behavior of independents, and hence toward the assumptions of spatial voting theory, as information levels increase, we see that even highly informed partisans show significant differences from what would be implied by unbiased spatial voting theory.
This study analyses the relevance and the meaning given by Italians to the political labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ between 1975 and 2006. Based on responses to the open-ended question ‘What do you mean by “left/right” in politics?’, the study compares five alternative hypotheses on the meaning of the left-right axis and show that, despite the alleged end of ideologies, the relevance of the axis has increased over time. A core of abstract meanings persists throughout the thirty-year period considered. As the importance of abstract meanings has increased over time, reference to more concrete contents (such as ‘parties’ and ‘leaders’) has decreased. The findings thus support the hypothesis that the left-right axis has the functional characteristics of social representations.
The empirical study of legislative behavior largely relies on roll-call vote analysis, but roll-call votes in many legislatures represent only a sample of legislative votes. We have good reasons to believe this sample is particularly poor for inferring party effects on legislative behavior. The selection of votes for roll call may be endogenous to exactly the characteristics of voting behavior (for instance, party cohesion) that we want to study. We must understand the roll-call vote institution and account for its selection effects before we can draw inferences about legislative behavior from roll-call results. This article develops a game-theoretic model of roll-call vote requests predicated on party leaders requesting votes to enforce party discipline. The model offers general and testable predictions about the selection process and how it affects observed and unobserved legislative voting behavior, particularly party cohesion.
Parties value unity, yet members of parliament have incentives to deviate from the party line. This article examines how members of the European Parliament (EP) respond to competing demands from national parties and European party groups. We examine ideological shifts within a single parliamentary term to assess how election proximity affects party group cohesion. Our formal model of legislative behavior suggests that when EP elections are proximate, national party delegations shift toward national party positions, thus weakening EP party group cohesion. Our Bayesian item-response analysis of roll calls in the 5th EP supports our theoretical predictions.
This paper examines the extent to which constituency and subconstituency preferences are reflected in roll-call voting in the 106th House. Aggregating 100,814 randomly selected respondents to measure subconstituency preferences provides an unprecedented ability to measure subconstituency preferences in the House. Looking at the relationship over all votes, “key votes,” and on individual votes confirms that representatives are not completely responsive to the district mean voter, that only majority party Republicans are especially responsive to the preferences of same-party constituents, and that same-party constituency preferences cannot entirely account for systematic differences in Republican and Democratic voting behavior.