Dimensional Realignment? Evidence from Parties and Voters in the Czech Republic

Across European party systems, identity-based conflicts over immigration, European integration, and national sovereignty increasingly cut across the economic left–right axis that long organised competition. Whether these conflicts consolidate into a single structuring dimension, and whether such consolidation reaches voters rather than remaining an elite phenomenon, varies across cases and remains contested. This article examines the question through the Czech Republic, a system long treated as a stable, economically structured outlier. A populist/anti-populist divide identified after the 2021 elections may have displaced the economic dimension as its organising logic, but whether this reorganisation extends to voters remains untested. Combining 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey data with an original pre-election survey, I recover the system's effective dimensionality through principal component analysis and test whether distance on the recovered dimensions predicts cross-party voter overlap across 56 directed dyads, using parametric and permutation-based models. Transnational, cultural, and populist conflicts collapse into a single axis that structures party competition and predicts voter preferences roughly two and a half times more strongly than economic distance. The findings show that even long-stable, economically organised party systems can undergo rapid dimensional reconfiguration at both elite and voter levels. The Czech case thus offers a window onto a broader European transformation in which identity-based divides increasingly displace the economic axis as the primary organising dimension of party competition.