Timotheos Frey

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.

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).

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.

Electoral Campaigns and Relation Mining: Extracting Semantic Network Data from Newspaper Articles

ABSTRACT Among the many applications in social science for the entry and management of data, there are only a few software packages that apply natural language processing to identify semantic concepts such as issue categories or political statements by actors. Although these procedures usually allow efficient data collection, most have difficulty in achieving sufficient accuracy because of the high complexity and mutual relationships of the variables used in the social sciences. To address these flaws, we suggest a (semi-) automatic annotation approach that implements an innovative coding method (Core Sentence Analysis) by computational linguistic techniques (mainly entity recognition, concept identification, and dependency parsing). Although such computational linguistic tools have been readily available for quite a long time, social scientists have made astonishingly little use of them. The principal aim of this article is to gather data on party-issue relationships from newspaper articles. In the first stage, we try to recognize relations between parties and issues with a fully automated system. This recognition is extensively tested against manually annotated data of the coverage in the boulevard newspaper Blick of the Swiss national parliamentary elections of 2003 and 2007. In the second stage, we discuss possibilities for extending our approach, such as by enriching these relations with directional measures indicating their polarity.

West European Politics in the Age of Globalization: Contents

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.

West European Politics in the Age of Globalization: Theory and methods

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.

West European Politics in the Age of Globalization: Frontmatter

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.

West European Politics in the Age of Globalization: Index

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.

Globalisering en de nationale politieke ruimte

Simon Bornscheir, Timotheos Frey, Hanspeter Kriesi en Romain Lachat zijn verbonden aan het Instituut voor Politieke Wetenschappen van de Universiteit van Zurich; Martin Dolezal en Edgar Grande werken voor het Geschwister Scholl Instituut voor Politieke Wetenschappen van de Ludwig-Maximilians-Universiteit in Munchen.