The Transformation of Political Competition in Western Europe: Which Dimensions Gain and Which Lose Importance?

The politics of Western Europe is often said to be in the process of profound transformation: Traditional divisions related to class and religion are replaced by new divisions between national identity and immigration and transnational integration. This transformation is framed as a succession of a traditional pattern, dominated by a left-right dimension, and a new pattern, dominated by a GAL/TAN dimension, where each pattern has particular relations to social divisions such as social class, religiosity, education, or gender. Yet, if one follows e.g. Lipset and Rokkan then the patterns of party competition and voter choices in Europe are essentially multidimensional and even country-specific. One may therefore ask about the relation of the new patterns of political competition with traditional ones, and to what degree the new configuration shows country-specific variations. While claims of the transformation of Western European politics are based typically collections of single country studies, studies that take a genuine European-level comparative perspective are rare. The proposed paper aims to fill this gap by a comprehensive discrete choice analysis that combines data about parties' political positions, obtained from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, with data about voters' social positions and party choices, obtained from the European Social Survey. The proposed paper thus allows to disentangle changes caused by parties' positional shifts from changes in voters' political orientations and preferences. In particular, it examines which dimensions become less important for traditionally relevant divisions by class and religion and which increase in relevance for new divisions along education and gender. Thereby, it provides important insights into the nature of the transformation of political competition in Western Europe.