Restructuring of European Party Competition and Evolution of Group Appeals (1994-2024)

Political competition is not only about policy issues, but also about which social groups parties claim to represent (or exclude), and to whom they appeal to. An increasing number of studies established that group appeals shape electoral competition, representation, and democratic conflict alongside policy positions. Yet, existing tools to track party system restructuring, notably expert surveys (CHES) and manifestos (MARPOR), exclusively rely on policy positions, disregarding other ways of political representation. Additionally, such approaches are constrained by periodic, “frozen” snapshots that struggle to capture the day-to-day dynamics of group-based competition. To address this limit, we introduce a novel Party Polarization Index that measures the extent to which parties’ group-based communication supports some social groups (often in terms of non-dominant/deserving groups), whereas they criticize others (often in terms dominant/threatening groups). This index is constructed on across both the socio-economic and socio-cultural cleavages, using fine-grained observational data. We apply this approach to written parliamentary questions submitted in the European Parliament between 1994 and 2019 (n = 187,617), classifying group appeals via a fine-tuned EuroBERT model. Results show that group appeals are overwhelmingly supportive, consistent with catch-all theory (depolarized party competition), though substantial adversarial politics remains structured along the socio-economic and socio-cultural cleavages. Most EPGs display stable ideological profiles over time, particularly on socio-cultural issues, with the notable exception of the Eurosceptics, who combine increasingly conservative socio-cultural positioning with a leftward shift on socio-economic issues – a pattern consistent with the growing adoption of welfare chauvinistic positions. In conclusion, this contribution shows that analyses of group appeals offer complementary – and unexplored – dimension of political competition compared to previous studies that focused on policies and issues competition.