Introduction

In this chapter, we take up the analysis of the supply side where we left offin our previous volume (Kriesi et al. 2008). Our goal is totest whether our sweeping generalizations hold up when confronted with datathat include later national elections in our six countries. The addition ofnew data allows us to distinguish between the 1990s and the 2000s, and toanalyse developments over time. We are freed from the vicissitudes ofpolitical conjunctures in individual elections, given that we have at leasttwo elections in both the 1990s and the 2000s to work with (see Table 2.1).We are now in a position to identify long-term trends in the structuralconfiguration of national political space better than we were before.

We begin by analysing the overall structural transformation of nationalpolitical space in Western Europe. As before, our analysis is based oncontent analysis of electoral campaign coverage in the major dailynewspapers in the six countries (see Chapter 2 for details). We havesufficient data on 92 parties from our six countries.

In a first step, we include all parties in the same analysis. By situatingthe parties from all six countries, independently of national specificities,we can identify in a common West European space the overall structure ofthat particular space. This presupposes that the meaning of a given issuecategory (such as opposition to immigration) is roughly comparable acrosscountries – an assumption that may not hold up for every case. Nevertheless,we believe it is not far off the mark for most issue-party combinations inour six countries.