Mapping the Cultural Cleavage: Party Differentiation and Citizens' Issue-Bundling across 31 European Countries

Political competition in the 21st century has become increasingly focused around a cultural cleavage, dividing green, alternative, and libertarian (GAL) positions from traditionalist, authoritarian, and nationalist (TAN) stances. Scholarship so far has treated the set of issues within the GAL-TAN dimension as a cohesive whole, overlooking potential cross-national variation and relying on an implicit assumption of equivalence. Addressing this assumption, this paper investigates how the specific issues that citizens bundle together to form this cleavage diverge across countries. I argue that citizens’ incorporation of a particular issue into the cultural cleavage is influenced by party differentiation on that issue, which acts as an elite cue that signals salience to voters. Focusing on three issues, namely LGBTQ rights, religion, and climate change, this study uses multilevel structural equation modelling to analyze how party differentiation shapes citizens’ embedding of these issues into the cultural dimension across 31 European countries. The findings reveal that in countries where parties exhibit greater differentiation on LGBTQ rights, there is a stronger link between homophobia and voters’ views on other cultural issues. Similarly, where parties show sharper divides on religion and climate change, citizens are more likely to connect these issues with other cultural concerns. These results challenge the assumption of a uniform cultural cleavage across Europe and highlight the role of elite cues, specifically party differentiation, in shaping issue-bundling among citizens.