Two Worlds of Representation? Patterns of Linkage Building in Western and Eastern Europe

The comparative study of patterns of democracies has attracted growing scholarly attention over the last fifteen years, a process not least facilitated by the availability of fresh comprehensive data sets (see lately V-DEM: varieties of democracy). While the number of elaborated analyses inspecting on trends of (conditional) convergence seems to have peaked more recently, researchers continued to address the question of changing degrees of (dis-)similarity of the operation of democracy in ‘older’ and ‘newer’ European democracies. A common denominator of many reputable studies among this latter cohort, joint analyses of party competition and electoral choice largely confine themselves to looking at programmatic competition. But neither do all voters focus on policy considerations in their evaluation of a party nor does it seem helpful to separate different strands of evaluation. This is the case e.g. for evaluations of leaders’ personalities and programmatic offers and for the role of party identification in the assignment of issue competence to certain parties. Turning on supply side politics across Europe, we bring together these yet unchained ends. We use a novel data set (DALP – Democratic Accountability and Linkage Project, Duke University and The World Bank, PI Herbert Kitschelt) to cover the wealth of accountability variants utilized/prioritized by parties and provide for in-depth analyses of avenues of linkage building in Eastern Europe compared to the West (generating data at country and party level). Preliminary computations unfold the existence of two-dimensional space of linkage building efforts in Western Europe. This includes distinctive locations and sound line-up of party families within that space. Also, first empirical probation into the data set indicates contrasting patterns of accountability in the East when it comes to the relationship of programmatic and clientelistic effort, and lower levels of party familial homogeneity in the sphere of clientelistic arrangements.