Introduction

Austrian post-war politics until the 1980s was a classic example of stability. For almost forty years after 1945, either the Social Democrats (SPÖ) or the Christian Democrats (ÖVP) governed the country: from 1945 to 1966 together in a grand coalition, the type of government most often associated with Austria. From 1966 to 1983, first the ÖVP, then the SPÖ (1970–83), managed to achieve majorities of their own and built five consecutive single-party governments. Until the early 1980s, voters were extremely loyal to the major parties not least because they were not affected by several social and economic problems experienced in other European countries, such as mass unemployment, strikes and riots, which famously inspired Pope Paul VI to call Austria an ‘Island of the Blessed’.

Since the 1980s, Austria has experienced far-reaching developments: the breakdown of Austro-Keynesianism and nationalized industries led to important changes in macro-economic policy, because market forces have become accepted as a legitimate instrument for achieving growth (Lauber 1992: 170; Winckler 1988). The end of the communist regimes in neighbouring countries redeemed Austria from its status as a Western border state, but civil wars in the Balkans gave rise to almost forgotten fears for security and led to waves of refugees. EU membership was finally achieved in 1995, but quarrels about neutrality, the ‘sanctions’ against the government in 2000, and the opening of borders to East European workers gave rise to Euroscepticism.

Introduction

The country chapters have shown how the structure of electoral competition has been affected by globalization in the recent period. In each of the six countries, we found strong evidence for a transformation of the main dimensions of the political space and for patterns of realignment. In the present chapter, we focus on the demand side of electoral competition, analyzing in more detail the formation of a potential for the new integration v. demarcation cleavage. We take here a comparative perspective and consider similarities and differences among countries in the nature of these developments. It must be emphasized that the nature of our data imposes some limitations on the extent to which voters' attitudes can be compared across elections. To be able to perform similar analyses and to rely on comparable categories of issues across space and time, it was necessary to standardize all scales measuring issue-orientations. This implies that differences among groups of voters are always expressed in a relative way. Absolute positions or absolute distances in the political space cannot be compared directly. This is certainly annoying, but it is unavoidable given the lack of survey questions and designs that are directly comparable across several countries and elections. While this problem limits the type of comparisons that can be performed, it leaves enough room to analyze several of the central implications of our theoretical argument.

Introduction

The UK constitutes the paradigmatic case of a majoritarian democracy. As we have argued in Chapter 2, such a system discourages the rise of new challengers in the party system. This implies a greater stability of partisan configurations, but it does not mean that party systems are not subject to change. Under conditions of majoritarian democracies, the transformation of the party system is, however, more likely to involve the transformation of mainstream parties. As we have argued in Chapter 2, in majoritarian systems, the number of mainstream parties is more limited and, as a consequence, their internal composition is likely to be more heterogeneous than in proportional systems. New structural cleavages are likely to cut across the mainstream parties and to put them under great tension. The strain is expected to be particularly strong in the mainstream party that finds itself in the opposition. Such a party is likely to expand the scope of conflict on issues linked to the new cleavage, i.e. to adopt a more radical stance with regard to such issues. Therefore, in a majoritarian system such as the UK, shifts of power within mainstream parties are not only more likely to occur than in PR systems, but they also take on a much greater significance.

In the period covered by our project, two decisive shifts have occurred in each one of the major parties – the Conservative Party and the Labour Party – with far-reaching implications for the restructuration of the party system as a whole.

This book is the result of a joint project of two teams of political scientists, one at the University of Zurich, the other at the University of Munich. The origins of this project date back to a hot summer afternoon in 2001, when Hanspeter Kriesi gave a presentation of some of his ideas about the impact of globalization on the transformation of Western European party systems before the special research programme (SFB) on ‘Reflexive modernization’ at the Technical University of Munich. The presentation was well received by the small audience of dedicated colleagues who did bear with the heat. Edgar Grande reacted by proposing to set up a joint comparative research project designed to test these largely speculative ideas. Eventually, the project got going in late 2002, with the joint support of the German Research Foundation (SFB 536 – Project C5), and of the Swiss National Science Foundation (1214-68010.02). Martin Dolezal together with several research assistants joined Edgar Grande to form the Munich team, while Simon Bornschier, Timotheos Frey, Romain Lachat and Hanspeter Kriesi constituted the Zurich team.

The two teams closely collaborated from the start, and evenly divided the challenging task of data collection in six selected countries – Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK – between them. We assembled data both for the political supply by the parties, and for the political demand by the voters.

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 (Zürn 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 (Zürn 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).

Globalizing West European politics: dimensions of comparative analysis

Has globalization resulted in a fundamental change of West European politics, its cleavage structures, parties and party systems? Although globalization has been one of the most important topics in social science research over the past decade, this question has thus far been widely neglected. In political science, most attention has been paid to the empirical analysis of the consequences of economic globalization on national state capacities and policies (e.g. Scharpf and Schmidt 2000a, 2000b; Weiss 2003) and to efforts at establishing new transnational institutions and organizations able to regulate effectively a rapidly globalizing capitalism (Zürn 1998; Held et al. 1999; Held 2004; Slaughter 2004; Grande and Pauly 2005). The impact of globalization on politics has received hardly any attention. This holds true in particular for political parties. While there are some studies on the reactions of interest groups to globalization (Zürn and Walter 2005; Streeck et al. 2006) and on the transnational organization of social movements (della Porta, Kriesi and Rucht 1999; Smith and Johnston 2002; Tarrow 2005; della Porta and Tarrow 2005), a systematic comparative analysis of the consequences of globalization on political cleavage structures, political parties and party systems is missing. Conventional wisdom still holds that political parties, their ideological profiles, their organizational capacities and their strategic interactions are all determined by domestic factors.

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.

Introduction

The Swiss political system is often viewed as an example of stability. The consensual style of politics, the unusual longevity of the grand coalition which forms the federal government, the high level of cooperation between social partners and the state, are all factors that explain or have contributed to this image. Further, such a perception is not only the point of view of outside observers. Kerr (1975), for example, emphasized in the 1970s that Switzerland had not faced any major political change since the late nineteenth century. This image is even reinforced by data from opinion surveys in this period, showing that Swiss citizens, in comparison with citizens of other European countries, are among the most satisfied with the state of their economy and political system (Sidjanski 1975).

Yet, over the last decades, Swiss politics have been marked by important developments. The transformations may seem to be less impressive, less dramatic than in neighbouring countries. But, at least by Swiss standards, they are significant and indicate deep changes in the social and economic basis of political cleavages. The single most important development is certainly the rise of the Swiss People's Party (SVP). A traditionally rural and Protestant party, it gradually changed its political orientation in the 1980s and early 1990s and has now become one of the most potent examples of the success of the populist right (Kriesi et al. 2005).

According to our assumptions outlined in the previous chapter, the political potentials created by the new cleavage are rather similar from one Western European democracy to the other. All these countries are characterized by increasingly comparable social, economic and cultural context conditions. Defined in most general terms, the relevant societal context characteristics which determine the political potential of the new cleavage in a given country include the relative strength of the country's traditional cleavages, the overall level of its economic and human development, its traditional openness to the world markets and its integration into the global community, its current economic difficulties, and its definition of the national community and the perceived threat to this community by processes of denationalization. While insisting on the broadly similar societal contexts of our six countries, we shall also point out some variability with regard to these general context characteristics, variability which mainly depends on the size of the countries. Three of our six countries belong to the small European democracies – Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands in that order – while our three other countries – France, the United Kingdom and Germany – are the three largest European democracies. In this chapter, we shall first consider one by one the societal context characteristics before moving on to a presentation of the more political context conditions.

Introduction

In their introduction to Dutch politics, Andeweg and Irwin (2005: 19) put the accent on the Netherlands as ‘a country of minorities’, without any doubt, as they maintain, ‘the single most important characteristic of Dutch politics’. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, although a numerical minority, the Liberals had dominated Dutch politics thanks to franchise restrictions. As the franchise was enlarged, however, they were gradually crowded out of political power and became a minority among others. Those other minorities have been structured by religion and class. Andeweg and Irwin argue that a socio-economic left–right dimension and a religious–secular dimension have always been and still are of crucial importance for the structuration of Dutch politics.

As far as religion is concerned, the Catholics, who corresponded to about one-third of the population in the late nineteenth century, did not constitute the only minority, since the Protestants were divided into a more orthodox and a more mainstream current. The religious groups all created their own parties: in addition to the Catholic party (KVP), the religious differences gave rise to two major Protestant parties – the more orthodox Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) and the more mainstream Christian Historical Union (CHU) – next to a host of additional small parties. The class based minority – the working class – entered the political arena relatively late due to the late industrialization of the country.