Martin Dolezal

West European politics in the age of globalization

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 ofWestern European politics will interest all students of European politics and political sociology.

Exploring the Stabilization of a Political Force: The Social and Attitudinal Basis of Green Parties in the Age of Globalization

About 30 years after gradually gaining parliamentary representation, Green parties have become established political actors throughout Western Europe. Based on a comparative analysis of 12 countries, this study argues that the stability this party family has achieved is the result of an enduring coalition with groups of voters who not only share a particular set of attitudes but also several specific social characteristics. Such a structural perspective clearly contradicts earlier approaches in the literature that primarily explained the Green vote as being issue- or value-based and sometimes simply as representing political protest. Green voters, by contrast, are young, highly educated, work as social-cultural specialists or are students, are predominantly urban, and less attached to Christian churches. These structural components are connected with environmental, libertarian, and pro-immigration attitudes. With respect to new divides caused by globalization processes, especially the latter issue explicitly distinguishes them from other voter groups.

Debating Islam in Austria, Germany and Switzerland: Ethnic Citizenship, Church–State Relations and Right-Wing Populism

This article explores public debates regarding Islam and Muslim immigration in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The authors are interested in which issues dominate the debates, which actors participate, which positions are taken, and which arguments are mobilised. Exploring three countries with an ethnic model of citizenship allows them to control for important cultural factors and to focus on three other explanatory variables: the dominant model of political participation, the relationship between the state and church/Islam, and the strength of right-wing populism. To test their arguments, they rely on a new dataset based on content analyses of quality newspapers from 1998 to 2007 that enables them to go beyond existing studies, which concentrate on state activities or on mass-level attitudes. The authors demonstrate that above all the relationship between the state and church/Islam, i.e. issue-specific opportunity structures, influences the debates to a great extent.

The Life Cycle of Party Manifestos: The Austrian Case

Election manifestos are one of the most prominent sources of data for the study of party politics and government. Yet the processes of manifesto production, enactment, and public reception are not very well understood. This article attempts to narrow this knowledge gap by conducting a first investigation into the ‘life cycle’ of election manifestos from the drafting stage to their use in the campaign and post-election periods. Specifically, it investigates the Austrian case between 1945 and 2008 (with special emphasis on the 1990s and 2000s), employing a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data. While the research is thus mostly exploratory, it develops systematic expectations about variation between parties according to their ideology, organisation, government status, and characteristics of their electorates across the stages of the manifesto life cycle. Of those factors, organisational characteristics and status as government or opposition parties were found to be relevant.

Almost an Earthquake: The Austrian Parliamentary Election of 2013

The Austrian election held on 29 September 2013 resulted in all-time lows for both major traditional parties, the SPO and OVP, but they nevertheless secured their combined majority by a tiny margin. Whereas the populist radical right FPO was supported by every fifth voter, its split-off, the BZO, lost parliamentary representation. The Greens achieved moderate gains and two new parties entered parliament: the populist Team Stronach and the liberal NEOS (Kritzinger et al. 2014). These results and a record low in turnout constitute important changes in Austrian politics, though the 2013 election falls short of having been a real ‘earthquake election’. Several features of the party system, especially in terms of coalition building, remained the same. 1

West European Politics in the Age of Globalization: Globalization and its impact on national spaces of competition

The political consequences of globalization are manifold. On the one hand, the processes covered by this term lead to the establishment of new forms of political authority and of new channels of political representation at the supranational level and open up new opportunities for transnational, international and supranational mobilization (Della Porta et al . 1999). On the other hand, the same processes have profound political implications at the national level. National politics are challenged both ‘from above’ – through new forms of international cooperation and a process of supranational integration – and ‘from below’, at the regional and local level. While the political consequences of globalization have most often been studied at the supra- or transnational level (Zurn 1998; Held et al . 1999; Greven and Pauly 2000; Hall and Biersteker 2002; Grande and Pauly 2005), we shall focus on the effects of globalization on national politics. We assume that, paradoxically, the political reactions to economic and cultural globalization are bound to manifest themselves above all at the national level: given that the democratic political inclusion of citizens is still mainly a national affair, nation-states still constitute the major arenas for political mobilization (Zurn et al . 2000). Our study focuses on Western European countries, where globalization means, first of all, European integration. For the present argument, however, this aspect of the European context is not essential. Europeanization and European integration can also be seen as special cases of the more general phenomenon of globalization (Schmidt 2003).

Political Conflict in Western Europe: Participation and party choice: comparing the demand side of the new cleavage across arenas

Introduction In this chapter, we compare the demand side of national and European elections, as well as of protest politics, in the early twenty-first century. In contrast to our previous studies (Lachat 2008; Lachat and Dolezal 2008), we are interested not only in the socio-structural foundations for issue positions and their electoral consequences, but also in who participates politically and in which modes. We want to know whether globalization ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ enter more forcefully into the various arenas of political mobilization. Can we detect substantial differences in socio-structural characteristics and issue positions across the arenas observed? A political line of conflict can only be called a cleavage if it is based on societal divisions (Bartolini and Mair 1990: 213–249). We expect globalization ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ to be opposed to one another along the new integration–demarcation cleavage, and are here interested in how the ‘new’ issues are embedded in the demand side of the political space. Is there still a close link between collective political actors and certain parts of the new societal divide? Asking ‘who participates?’ raises important questions about the quality of democracy in the twenty-first century. We focus on political equality in an outcome-oriented sense, in line with research on participation (e.g. Teorell et al . 2007a; Verba and Nie 1972; Verba et al . 1995), and explore whether certain preferences of the public and needs of societal groups are unequally represented in the electoral or protest arenas. Our analysis describes inequalities in expressed needs and preferences and links them to the new political potentials brought about by globalization. The question of ‘who takes part’ or who is being organized into politics focuses on the emergence of political dividing lines and is a key question in the theory of cleavages (Bartolini 2000; Rokkan 2000).

West European Politics in the Age of Globalization: The electoral consequences of the integration–demarcation cleavage

Introduction We conclude our analyses in this chapter by considering the links between parties and voters. After having presented separate analyses of the demand side and of the supply side of electoral competition, in this chapter we seek to relate both levels. Our main argument in this volume has been that globalization leads to the formation of a potential for a new line of conflict, and that the corresponding issues and interests are articulated by political parties. We have presented much evidence for the emergence of such a new division and for the polarizing capacity of the issues associated with globalization. At the level of parties, we have observed substantial changes in the configuration of the main actors. Cultural issues have become more important for explaining the structure of party positions. Furthermore, among these issues, those linked with the process of globalization, such as the questions of immigration and European integration, have become more salient. This is a consequence of the transformation of the character of the cultural line of conflict. Following these developments, electoral competition cannot be summarized by a single line of conflict. Both economic and cultural differences are now equally relevant. In addition, important transformations could be observed among voters. The structure of political attitudes has changed following a similar pattern.

Beyond salience and position taking: How political parties communicate through their manifestos

This article examines aspects of election manifestos that are largely ignored by extant manifesto-based studies focusing on issue saliencies and policy positions. Drawing on the literatures on negative campaigning, retrospective voting, party mandates and personalization, we develop a scheme of categories that allows for the analysis of attacks on competitors, references to a party’s track record, subjective and objective policy pledges and the prominence of party leaders in manifestos. We also show that these elements are present in manifestos of major European parties. The relevance of these categories, we argue, should be influenced by a party’s status in government or opposition, its ideology, its size, the relative popularity of party leaders and the occurrence of early elections. Our systematic examination of 46 Austrian election manifestos produced between 1986 and 2013 demonstrates that many of these expectations are supported by the evidence. Most notably, it emerges that government and opposition parties write manifestos that differ with respect to all of the five characteristics analysed. This suggests that there are systematic differences between government and opposition party manifestos that should be taken into consideration by scholars engaged in manifesto-based research.

Negative Campaigning and the Logic of Retaliation in Multiparty Competition

The extant literature has demonstrated that the logic of retaliation is a core feature of negative campaigning. Attacks by one side induce counterattacks by the other. Yet most research on the interactive nature of negative campaigning is limited to two-party competition and provides little theoretical justification for why political actors should respond to attacks with counterattacks. The present paper addresses these research gaps. We argue that the negativity bias in human information processing and the zero-sum nature of elections make retaliation a rational strategy. Importantly, these arguments also imply that retaliation may not be the only plausible response to attacks in multiparty systems. Rather, parties may prefer to react to attacks from one competitor by attacking another. To grasp empirically how being attacked and attacking are related, we conduct a highly disaggregated time series analysis of such instances while controlling for other factors that may influence actor behavior. Our analyses draw on several thousand party press releases issued during three national election campaigns in Austria, a typical European multiparty system. They show that retaliation is an important strategy also in multiparty politics. Yet in such context, parties do not exclusively follow a tit-for-tat approach but rather display more complex patterns of attack behavior.