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Opposition between the far right and the new left has transformed West European politics, mainly through increasing sociocultural conflicts. We ask what the new cleavage articulated by these parties implies for the politicization of inequalities in advanced knowledge societies. We contrast two diverging expectations in existing literature: A first, more rational-choice-based perspective expects a trade-off, with new left voters "privileged" by economic transformations emphasizing sociocultural inequalities over socioeconomic ones–and vice versa for "disadvantaged" far right voters. A second, more sociological perspective, predicts attitudes on inequalities to be aligned along a single dimension from new left "universalists" being inequality-averse to right-wing "particularists" being more inequality-tolerant. Our evidence based on original survey data from Germany supports the second perspective. Studying the structural (educational, class, etc.) foundations of inequality aversion suggests that even the transformed (new) left electorate is more sensitive to all dimensions of inequality than voters on the (far) right.

Many recent studies have underlined the importance of inequality perceptions as determinants of political demands and behavior. Yet, this literature often focuses on the public perception of one single, often economic, dimension of inequality. This study aims to broaden our perspective and provides a comprehensive assessment of public perceptions of socioeconomic (income, education, and class inequality) and sociocultural inequalities (gender, sexual orientation, and migration background inequality). Furthermore, we disentangle different components of inequality perceptions: the assessed importance of differences, as how problematic they are judged, and who thinks that these inequalities are central to political debates nowadays. We find that highly educated respondents attribute more importance and mostly judge inequalities across the board as more important than the less educated. While information on the extent of inequality can move the assessment of how important inequality is in society, the judgment of these divides remains unchanged, hinting to more deep-seated beliefs that are not as easily changed.

Scholars have paid increasing attention to how questions of multi-levelgovernance have become politicized in the domestic political arena. Issuessurrounding democratic government itself have received surprisingly littleattention in this debate. In this article, we ask how political parties politicizethe principles of liberal democracy within advanced democracies. We expectthat challenger parties are most likely to question existing principles. Thetargets of their criticism, however, should vary according to their ideologicalorigins. Conducting automated quantitative text analysis of Swiss, Germanand Austrian party press releases between 2006 and 2018 using amultidimensional dictionary of liberal democracy, we confirm that left-libertarian and populist radical right parties are the main challengers of thedemocratic status quo. The foundation of criticism, however, differsfundamentally. While left-libertarians focus on principles that strengthenindividual autonomy in politics, populist radical right parties demand moreforms of participation and fewer constraints by liberal elements of democracy.

Fast 50 Prozent der Wähler*innen, die bei den nationalen Wahlen 2015 der SP Schweiz ihre Stimme gegeben hatten, entschieden sich bei den nationalen Wahlen von 2019 anders. Wer der Urne 2019 nicht gleich gänzlich fernblieb, wanderte vornehmlich von der SP zu den Grünen ab, während die medial oft beschworenen Wanderungen von der SP zur SVP praktisch inexistent waren und tatsächlich seit Beginn unserer Datenreihe Mitte der 1990er-Jahre nicht zu beobachten sind. Wieso? Erklärt die Zusammensetzung der Wählerschaften dieser Parteien diese Muster? Die Einstellungen der Wähler*innen? Und worin unterscheiden sich SP und GPS aus Sicht der Wähler*innen überhaupt? Könnten Unterschiede in der Wahrnehmung der Kompetenz von SP und GPS seitens der Wähler*innen erklären, wieso Wähler*innen (immer häufiger) von der SP zur GPS oder (immer seltener) von der GPS zur SP wechseln?

40 bis 45% aller Wähler*innen in der Schweiz können sich vorstellen, die SP zu wählen, aber nur etwa 40% von diesen potenziellen Wähler* innen tun es tatsächlich. Die SP verfügt demnach über ein beträchtliches unausgeschöpftes Wählerpotenzial. Überlappungen in den Wählerpotenzialen finden sich im links-grünen Parteienspektrum, aber kaum mit rechten Parteien: Die potenziell zusätzlich gewinnbaren SP-Wähler*innen finden sich vor allem in den Wählerschaften der Grünen und Grünliberalen und bei den jungen Nichtwählenden. Wer sind diese potenziell gewinnbaren Wähler*innen? Sie sind in der Tendenz jung, mehrheitlich weiblich und gut gebildet. Thematisch halten sie umweltpolitische, gesellschaftspolitische, internationale und institutionelle Herausforderungen für die wichtigsten Probleme, welche die Schweiz lösen muss. Im Einklang mit dieser Problemwahrnehmung finden im sozialdemokratischen Wählerpotenzial progressive gesellschaftspolitische Positionen die grösste positive Resonanz, stärker noch als sozialpolitisch expansive Positionen. Das Spiegelbild der potenziellen Gewinne bilden hohe potenzielle Verluste zu den beiden grünen Parteien: Gut 70 Prozent der SP-Wählenden können sich auch vorstellen, die grüne Partei zu wählen, fast 40 Prozent können sich auch vorstellen, die grünliberale Partei zu wählen.

In fighting the spread of COVID-19, the drastic measures undertaken by governments worldwide demonstrate a trade-off between public health and fundamental democratic principles. Yet this behaviour is not consistent across democracies, which motivates this paper to examine why some democracies were willing to constrain individual freedoms and concentrate power more than others during the pandemic’s first wave. Creating two indices to measure the degree to which COVID-19 policies interfere with these democratic principles in 34 European countries, the analyses show that the large variation cannot be solely explained by pandemic-related factors. It is argued that the strong protection of democratic principles already established in ‘normal’ times makes governments more reluctant to opt for restrictive policies. By highlighting how differences in policy responses are attributed to provisions guaranteeing individual liberties, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how democracies handle the democratic dilemma in times of crises.

This article investigates how the success of radical right parties affects the policy positions of mainstream parties. We do this using a regression discontinuity approach that allows us to causally attribute mainstream parties’ positional changes to radical right strength independent of public opinion as a potential confounder. Making use of exogenous variation created through differences in electoral thresholds, we empirically demonstrate that radical right success, indeed, causally affects mainstream parties’ positions. This is true for mainstream left as well as mainstream right parties. These findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on party competition as they indicate that other parties’ behavior and not only public opinion plays a crucial role in explaining parties’ policy shift.

This letter investigates how voter transitions between parties affect parties’ policy positioning. While a growing literature investigates the role of election results as signals for parties’ policy adaption, it has mostly focused on vote changes of individual parties. However, parties do not know only whether they have won or lost in an election; they also have detailed information on which parties they won votes from and which parties they lost votes to. We make two arguments about how voter transitions should affect the strategic policy choices of political parties. First, when a party has lost votes to another party it will adapt its policy positions toward that party. Second, parties that have overall lost more votes become more likely to adapt their positions. Making use of a data set on individual voter transitions and party positions we can demonstrate that voter transitions indeed affect parties’ competitive behavior.

The dramatic decline in vote shares on the mainstream left in many recent elections has led to a renewed discussion about a crisis of Social Democracy. One popular argument is that Social Democratic decline is the result of these parties' liberal cultural positions and pro-EU stance, with both topics increasingly salient for their traditional voters, particularly among the working class. However, we lack comparative evidence testing this argument. In this paper, we combine CHES data on party positions with ESS survey data to analyze the electoral effects of Social Democratic parties' second dimension and EU positions. In addition, we focus on whether support from different socio-economic groups is sensitive to these positions. In contrast to much public debate, we find that more authoritarian/nationalist and more anti-EU positions are if anything associated with lower rather than greater electoral support for social democratic parties.

Many studies have found that European parties change their policy positions in response to changes in public opinion. This is both theoretically and normatively appealing, suggesting that European party politics operates in a way that is consistent with spatial models. Nonetheless, virtually all previous studies are based on a single, uni-dimensional measure of public opinion: left–right self-placement from the Eurobarometer surveys. This measure has a number of flaws, including the fact that political conflict in Europe now occurs across multiple issue dimensions beyond the classic divide on state involvement in the economy. We used new measures of Europeans’ ideological positions across four different issue dimensions and 26 countries from 1981–2016, together with data on parties’ policy positions from their manifestos, to re-evaluate findings on responsiveness. Across many different model specifications, samples and outcome measures, we found virtually no evidence that European political parties respond to public opinion on any issue dimension. Our findings suggest that scholars may require better measures of party positions, more nuanced theories of responsiveness (for example to sub-groups, or across longer time horizons), or may need to refocus their attention towards responsiveness via policy outcomes rather than parties’ policy commitments.

Recent elections have revived the debate about the decline of social democracy, often attributed to the numerical decline in the working class and its alienation due to the mainstream left’s economically centrist and socially liberal policy stances. To explain changes in these parties’ fortunes, we instead argue that researchers need to analyze the preferences of key electoral groups on the main axes of political competition and the role of information-transmitting intermediaries in shaping these preferences. Specifically, we suggest that (1) mainstream left parties can win votes by taking up more investment-oriented positions if they (2) also take up liberal sociocultural positions and (3) do not face opposition from influential unions. We find support for these expectations using aggregate-level election results and individual-level survey responses. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of party success in advanced democracies and for empirical models of party competition more generally.