The transformation of historical cleavages and the rise of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe

Right-wing populist parties should be seen, I suggest in this book, in the larger context of changing societal structures that have affected party systems since the late 1960s.While European party systems continue to carry the stamp of the historical class and religious cleavages, the dimensions underlying party interactions have been transformed.A first restructuring of political space occurred as a consequence of the Notwithstanding the increasing similarities of right-wing populist parties in terms of their discourse, however, their far from uniform success across Western Europe begs an explanation.While a first major theme of this book is to demonstrate the background of right-wing populist parties' mobilization in terms of ideology and societal potentials, the second objective is to place the emergence of this new party family in the wider context of stability and change of party systems.More specifically, I suggest that we should pay attention to the interplay between the traditional conflicts that underlie European party systems, and new political conflicts that may or may not alter the dominant patterns of oppositions.New divides will only materialize if the 2002, Carter 2005), or by the conviction that voters will only support parties that adequately represent them on both relevant dimensions (Kitschelt 1995).Both assumptions are problematic and do not hold up against empirical evidence.For scholars working within the cleavage approach, the idea that voters may experience conflicts of interest as a result of cross-cutting cleavages is in fact far from new.As a result of the recent transformation of the cultural dimension of conflict in European party systems, this problem is posed anew and has resulted in dealignment and realignment of various groups of voters.Two important predictors emerge that While the theoretical approach developed in this book is not geared at a specific party family, it will be applied to explain the success of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe.In a first analysis of the right-wing populist party family, I focus on France, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain.These countries vary in important respects, such as their size, the degree to which they experienced an economic crisis in the 1990s, and regarding their political institutions, which range from clearly majoritarian to highly consensual.Furthermore, their party systems differ, ranging from a two-party system in Britain to multi-party formats with 6 to 7 Measuring the Programmatic Content of Party OppositionsIn order to locate parties in the resulting issue space, I rely on data based on a coding of the media coverage of election campaigns that has been collected within a larger project (Kriesi et al. 2006), and covers one election in the 1970s, and three elections in the 1990s and 2000s.The choice of this data has advantages as well as disadvantages.Its advantages over expert survey data are clear.Because small political formations such as right-wing populist parties may not have marked profiles concerning all issue dimensions, expert surveys risk to produce data that is biased by theoretical expectations regarding parties' positions.An obvious disadvantage of the campaign data over that collected by the Manifesto Research Group/Comparative Manifestos Project (Budge et al. 2001, Klingemann et al. 2006) is that is covers only a relatively limited time-span.Given the focus on the long-term transformation of cleavages, it would have been promising to be able to extend the analysis to the 1950s and 1960s, where it is generally assumed that cleavages were still "frozen".An important advantage of the campaign data over party manifestos and especially over country chapters fleshes out country-specific ways in which the traditionalistcommunitarian potential is mobilized and identifies additional determinants of the success of the populist right.Thus, the analysis of the French case sheds light on the role of European integration in the Front National's mobilization, and underlines the importance of the strategies both of the established right and of the left in shaping the potential for the populist right.Chapter 4 From Structure to Culture and Back: The Perpetuation and Transformation of Cleavages "Despite more or less thirty years of close reading by countless scholars in a variety of different fields, and despite what is now a genuinely voluminous literature seeking to explore and often test the ramifications of the so-called »freezing hypothesis«, there still remains a marked degree of confusion about what precisely was believed by Lipset and Rokkan to have settled into place by the 1920s" (Mair 2001: 27).