Party Crashers: The Determinants of Left Party Ideological Shifts

• In Event: Great Recession: Effect on Parties and Protest

Abstract

Under what conditions are traditional left parties likely to change their stripes and move towards the center? Prior to the Great Recession, European parties of the left had been moving towards the center for decades, creating a spatial opening for new more left leaning parties, such as Podemos or Syriza, or leaving themselves vulnerable to an internal coup from the left, as with the UK Labour Party, when the crisis hit. Using the CMP data, we identified structural breaks in the ideological positions of left parties, treating the breaks as points of qualitative change in the character of left parties. We used this data to explore the proximate causes of shifts in party character, emphasizing that major economic crises (such as currency crises) often provided a focal point learning episode preceding major turning points in ideology. We use this analysis to understand the state of party systems when the Great Recession hit and to analyze their vulnerability to the emergence of a new, non-mainstream challenge from the left in some countries.

Authors

• Steffen Blings, Oberlin College

• Stephen Craig Nelson, Northwestern University

• Christopher Way, Cornell University