How Have Political Parties’ Claim-Making Roles Changed? A Comparative Analysis of Parliamentary Debates from 11 Countries (1960-2024)

According to Rokkan and Lipset’s seminal approach of social cleavages, political parties emerge as representatives of specific social groups that mobilize against societal injustices. Yet, scholarship contend that this role has been declining – if not vanishing – since the ‘golden age’ of mass parties in the 1950-1960s. This decline is due to a combination of interrelated phenomena, i.e. voters’ dealignment under modernization processes (Beck 2006), the waning of (traditional) ideological cleavages socioeconomic development and emergence of catch-all parties under (Mair 2003, Kriesi 2012), demobilization of party organizations (Van haute & Gauja 2016), and the rise of personalized politics over party politics (Rahat & Kenig 2018) in the new media age (Croner 2003). Yet, instead of concluding to the vanishing roles of parties, another trend of the literature suggested to study parties’ roles beyond their historically rooted ‘post-WWII mode of representation’, namely focusing on their evolving claim-making roles (Saward 2008). Adopting a cross-sectional and longitudinal research design, we aim to analyse how political parties have evolved in their claim-making roles across countries over the last decades. First, we seek to identity patterns in the transformations of parties’ representation role over time. Do traditional parties continue to represent their historic core constituents (e.g. blue collars represented by social-democrat parties); or have traditional parties shifted towards alternative groups (e.g. the middle class and urban professionals)? Have certain social groups become ‘unrepresented’ during this process (e.g. blue collars), or are they now represented by other parties (e.g. niche or new populist and extreme-right parties)? Second, we assess whether representative patterns differ across countries: are countries’ political and institutional features the main factors behind the differences observed (e.g. electoral rules, party systems, government formation)? Our central hypothesis posits that evolution in the roles of parties as “claim-makers” reflect a dynamic process resulting from the actors’ strategic reactions to endogenous factors (e.g. increasing party fragmentation and rise of populist parties) and exogenous stimulus (e.g. economic crises as in 1973 and 2008). To test this hypothesis, we study parliamentary debates (1960-2024) from 11 democracies across the world (US and CA, in Northern America; BE, UK, DE, ES, PT, SW in Europe, ZA and GH in Africa; and Australia). Adopting a most different system design, we aim to identify structural transformations in the claim-making role of parties that transcend institutional and political differences. Alternatively, we explore how specific countries’ features shaped distinct claim-making patterns since the 1960s. Empirically, we use different NLP techniques, combining Named Entity Recognition algorithms (NER) and Large Language Models (LLMs), to identify parties’ claim-making of issues and interests towards specific groups (against outgroups). Overall, we seek to offer a comprehensive understanding of claim-making roles of parties in the parliamentary arena, and the evolving patterns discernable over time and across specific institutional and political contexts. Our goal is ultimately to empirically inform theoretical and normative discussions about the evolving nature of representative democracies.