New Challenges for Representative Democracy: Changing Political Space in Europe

• In Event: Sociocultural Conflict in a Globalized Era

Abstract

European democracies face disruptive challenges, such as success of anti-establishment, nationalist parties or events such as the Brexit referendum. Politicisation and contestation about Europe are at the centre of the current political agenda. Globalization processes have transformed the economic landscape and reshaped political alignments, with the emergence of new conflicts (especially between winners and losers of globalization) within a political space still ideologically structured by two dimensions (economic and cultural). However, recent challenger parties appear to question even such alleged bi-dimensionality – e.g. anti-immigrant stances can be paired with progressive views on individual civil rights (see the Dutch PVV). In other words, we might be experiencing a phase of ideological de-structuring (both in public opinion and in party supply). In light of such challenges, the objective of the proposed paper is to gain a systematic understanding of whether and how models of the political space based on a fixed dimensionality are still able to describe issue stances among voters in Western Europe (with new conflicts around European Union, globalization and immigration embedded into two‐dimensional political spaces), or rather whether a deeper de-structuration of the issue preferences is spreading among citizens. In this regard, an in-depth interpretation of political change requires a generational perspective. Hence, the paper also investigates whether generations differ in terms of presence, type and levels of ideological structuring of their issue preferences. Answering these questions will inevitably provide indications on future developments of European representative democracies. The analysis relies on original CAWI surveys carried out between 2017 and 2019 for the Issue Competition Comparative Project in seven Western European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain). These surveys covered a multiplicity of issues on different policy domains, namely the economy, Europe, globalization, immigration and social issues, along with respondents’ self-placement on the left-right dimension.

Author

• Nicola Maggini, European University Institute