Electoral Dealignment and Age Effect: Political Context and Party System Change During the Crisis

The countries worst hit by the 2008 Great Recession show different patterns of party system change. While in Spain and Greece new (and old) parties have shattered the two-party system that characterized the democratic era, and in Italy new forces have transformed the party system in a tri-polar one, in Portugal established actors have succeeded in avoiding the entrance of new political forces. These distinct trajectories suggest that electoral dealignment - intended here as the general weakening of the explanatory power of social structure on voting choice – may vary in time, across countries and across cleavages. Moreover, in some countries new patterns of political competition (i.e. realignment) has come to the fore. The main objective of this paper is examining and explaining different patterns of party system change using age as the main independent variable. In short, we argue that new (young) voters are the drivers of change. In particular, we contend that beyond period effects – namely external economic shocks – life-cycle and cohort effects are important sources of electoral dealignment, even when we control for the main explanatory factors of electoral dealignment, such as unemployment, political sophistication and cognitive mobilization. On the one hand, voters that come of age at roughly the same time share common influences because of the specific political context during the formative years. We can therefore assume that young people that experienced the impact of the crisis roughly reacted in the same way to the global crisis. On the other, the effect of declining partisanship among generations have eroded electoral alignments in the medium or long run. Given that the young are generally seen as ‘the losers of globalization’, our main expectation is that the global financial crisis has strengthened the impact of cohort effects, while period effects (i.e. euro-zone crisis) has been relatively smaller. The paper aims to disentangle the complex relationship between age effects (life-cycle, period and cohort) and the political context by adopting a cross-country and longitudinal perspective. From this viewpoint, we examine in details the process of party dealignment in Southern European countries before and after the crisis (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain). The study proceeds in two steps. First, drawing on the European Social Survey we examine age-cohort-period effects on partisanship, highlighting cross-country differences. The second part of the paper is devoted to the analysis of Southern European countries and we use available national post-election surveys to investigate whether young vote is (more or less) associated to electoral dealignment (i.e. support in challenger parties). This research will contribute to the theoretical and empirical debate on party dealignment and the sources of party system change during the crisis period.