Electoral competition between post-communist and new left parties in Southern Europe

Research on European radical left parties and their voters has been a relatively understudied area in the political science. However, the political upheavals that have taken place in the aftermath of the Great Recession have brought this family of parties back into the spotlight, and it has enjoyed significant recent successes. The European radical left cannot be considered a homogenous ideological family. Research in this regard has focused on the programmatic differentiation between traditional post-communist and radical new left parties, depending on their allegiance to traditional Marxist ideology and symbology and their policy positions, which differ especially on the issues of the new politics. While it is most common for the radical left to be represented in Western European parliaments by one of these options, there are countries where there is regular electoral competition between these two subtypes of the radical left, with both gaining parliamentary representation on a sustained basis over time. This usually happens in Portugal and Greece, and has occasionally occurred in France, where parties of the new radical left emerged as a response to the immobilism and ideological traditionalism of post-communist parties, responding to the demands of new social movements, such as feminism or environmentalism. Despite this, how voters behave when this electoral competition takes place has not been sufficiently studied. Our article analyses, through quantitative methods and the ten rounds of the European Social Survey, the socio-demographic and attitudinal differences of the electorates of post-communist and radical new left parties when they compete against each other in national elections. We analyse eleven elections, held between 2000 and 2020 in Greece, Portugal and France, in which electoral competition took place between post-communist and radical new left parties. We find relevant socio-demographic differences, with the electorate of post-communist parties being older, except for Greece, and less educated than the electorate of the radical new left. The electorate of post-communist parties is also more likely to work in occupations that can be categorised as unskilled working class. On attitudinal issues, we find a greater rejection of the cultural economic consequences of immigration among the voters of post-communist parties and a greater Euro-scepticism and ideological extremism. Regarding LGBT rights, although initially we did not obtain any results, when interacting this variable with countries we found lower support for these among voters of post-communist parties in Greece and Portugal.