The Socioeconomic Foundations of Political Party Formation

• In Event: Political Party Dynamics in Contemporary Europe

Abstract

The appearance of two new party families—the Green parties and the Radical Right parties—is arguably the most salient political phenomenon of recent decades. Across OECE countries, Green/Ecologist parties appeared in the 1980s and expanded their presence to 26 parliaments in 2018. Radical Right Parties advanced in a similar manner, expanding their presence from 5 to 34 parliaments. Since their first appearance, these new families have become political forces that have restructured political landscapes, not only in OECD countries but around the world (Rohrschneider 1993, Richardson and Rootes 2006, Mudde 2007, Rydgren 2018).

Seminal work by Kitschelt (1988, 1994, Kitschelt and McGann 2005) has offered a theory to explain the rise of the new party families. In this work, the parties emerged as a consequence of structural changes in the economy. Important changes included the expansion of higher education, globalization, economic modernization, and the expansion of welfare states. They caused a restructuring of the occupations and market experience that people face in their daily lives, with more people having tertiary education, working in care-related professions in the welfare state, and so on. The theory’s key argument is that the restructuring created new groups of people with shared experience, but without political representation. Traditional parties did not alter their platforms to cater to the new groups, which opened up for mobilization of the new party families.

In this paper, we use unique administrative and survey data from Sweden to provide the first empirical test Kitschelt’s seminal theory on party emergence. The theory gives clear predictions for precisely which labor market and consumption experiences should be reflected in each of the two new party types compared to the traditional parties on the left and right. Our data can measure these experiences for every politician. The basis for this analysis is a complete database for every politician who was nominated or elected to political office between 1982 and 2014. Every politician can then be linked via their mandatory ID code to extensive information on their educational background, family situation and, most importantly, occupational history. We also add data for the task content of 3-digit occupations from the O’NET database on expert surveys. We use the datasets to quantify the variables that are expected to socialize people in the two ideological dimensions: capitalist-socialist and authoritarian-libertarian. We then plot, in this two two-dimensional space of labor market experiences, the distribution for politicians who came together to form Sweden’s Green Party and the Sweden Democrats. A fundamental test of the theory is to analyze how the new parties are localized in the preference space, and how their locations compare to the traditional political parties, the Social Democrats and the Conservatives.

We find that the politicians in the Green Party and Sweden Democrats are strongly differentiated from each other on the labor market experiences that socialize the authoritarian-libertarian cleavage. On the contrary, the Social Democrats and Conservatives are similar in these experiences, while they differ in the experiences that socialize the left-right ideological dimension. An extended analysis uses survey data to find that the labor experiences also predict self-stated left-right and authoritarian-libertarian preferences among politicians from all parties.

Overall, our results strongly support the theory that the new parties grew out of deep preference clusters in the population, shaped by long-term economic and social change. This contradicts theories that describe the formation of the new party families an anti-establishment response to collusion and cartelization between the traditional parties (Katz and Mair 1995, 2009). Our results also contradict theories that center on a socialization experience of resource abundance in one’s adolescence as the main mobilizing force of these post-materialist party families (e.g. Inglehart 1981, Inglehart and Flanagan 1987).

Authors

• Olle Folke, Uppsala University

• Johanna Rickne, Stockholm University

• Jan Szulkin, Department of Government, Uppsala University