Why Do West European Countries Feature Similar Patterns of Change in Partisan Competition? A Political-Economic Explanation

Despite evident diversities, there is a story to be told about the similarities between western European party systems, and more precisely about the overtime trends in political competition. Striking similarities between western European countries can also be identified in relation to overtime changes in their political economies. Is there a mechanism linking these two sets of similarities? In this article we explore this possibility. As political competition is essentially about what parties would do if they were in government, we conjecture that the boundaries to what governments can (and cannot) do play a key structuring role. We expect that dramatic changes in institutionalized consensus about what can or cannot be done in terms of public spending has important repercussions for partisan competition. To test the plausibility of our argument, we investigate the (in)stability of west European party-systems between the 1950s and 2023. Our analysis of party-system (in)stability is composed of two main parts. The first part is based on data about the strength of governing majorities in Europe across decades. The second part investigates the data on the contents of party-competition (Lehmann et al. 2024), dividing the time-spectrum into distinct macro-economic periods. Our analysis sheds a new light on the transformations of European party-systems. Existing literature has already extensively documented the emergence of a new political conflict between on the one hand progressive forces advocating for environmental policies and a more universal redistribution of welfare benefits, and on the other political forces defending traditional industrial jobs and wanting to keep welfare benefits for the native population. Besides finding further confirmation of the increasing relevance of this new conflict, in this article we show that the structuration of party-systems along this conflict is at least partially dependent on the availability of public funds. We find that the conflict crystallizes more in times when there are more public funds to be allocated. In times when there is a scarcity of funds, instead, political conflict gets more dispersed into multiple cross-cutting issue dimensions. Co-Author: Damian Raess (University of Laval, Canada)