The Giant is Not Sleeping Any More: How Populism and the European Divide Interact to Create a New Dimension of Political Competition

Political change is at the core of the recent research in both the literature on the changing party-systems and on the populist parties. The first questions the nature of new issue divides such as globalization or the EU and their role in the restructuration of the space of political competition. The second tries to grasp and explain the appeal of the populist set of ideas. This paper seeks to connect the two fields of research by contemplating in Western Europe the relation of populism with new issue divides and their combined effect on the evolution of the structure of political competition. Using geometrical analyses to explore the 2017 Chapel Hill Flash Expert Survey on European political parties, we show first that Europe has grown into an independent issue divide, and second that the position of parties on Europe strongly aligns with their propensity to adopt the populist set of ideas. Our Principal Component Analysis thus highlights the emerging pattern of a two-dimensional structure of political conflict. One that gathers Europe and populism, and the other orthogonal that regroups economic and cultural issue divides. In sum, the first embodies a dimension of conflict about the organization of the polity, while the second represents the policy dimension, reminding of the original territorial and functional axis pointed out by Lipset and Rokkan. Our results reveal that this pattern is strongly explicative of the current state of the European party-systems. In the shape of a horseshoe, the parties of the mainstream left and right and the parties of the populist radical left and populist radical right families are each located at one of the four intersections of the two dimensions. Finally, a cluster analysis confirms a specific and homogeneous positioning of the parties by ideological families.