On 5 May at 10.30, Ruth Dassonneville will give a talk on “The Restructuring of European Party Competition through the Lens of Party Electorates”. No registration needed.

Ruth is the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Democracy and associate professor at the University of Montreal (Canada). Ruth is currently visiting the EUI in Florence on her sabbatical. She does intriguing research on party behavior and representation of voters in the political system. Her researches touches on central concepts such as economic voting, election forecasting, political trust and electoral volatility. Find more info about her research.

More info about the talk:

The Restructuring of European Party Competition through the Lens of Party Electorates

Ruth Dassonneville, Université de Montréal/EUI

Liesbet Hooghe, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/EUI

Gary Marks, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/EUI

Abstract:

A large scholarly literature has drawn attention to a restructuring of party competition and an emergence of new political cleavages across European democracies. This work provides strong evidence of an increased multi-dimensionality of party competition.  However, the micro-level foundations of this transformation of European party systems are less well understood. We contribute to the literature on the realignment of European party systems by taking a voter-perspective to evaluate how voters view the structure of party competition, and how these views have changed over time. To do so, we make use of the European Election Study voter surveys of 1999 and 2019. We leverage these surveys’ measures of citizens’ self-reported probabilities to vote for different parties, which we match up to party-level information from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, to map the electoral overlap and strong opposition between different party families. We also estimate to what extent party positions on the economic left-right dimension and the GAL/TAN dimension explain the patterns that emerge. Our results provide evidence of important substantial change in citizens’ views of the structure of party competition over time. Specifically, we find that radical-right parties are quite isolated in 2019, but not in 1999. We also find that the electorates that are most opposed to each other are those of the radical-right and green parties in 2019, while in 1999 there was more opposition to radical-left party options. Underlying these shifts is an increased weight of parties’ positions on the GAL/TAN dimension for how voters evaluate their propensities to vote for different parties.