The New Cultural Divide and the Two-Dimensional Political Space in Western Europe

Abstract

While the endorsement of universalistic values by the New Left led to a first transformation of political space in Western Europe, the counter-mobilisation of the extreme populist right resulted in a second transformation in the 1990s. This article focuses on the discursive innovations and normative foundations that have driven the emergence of a conflict opposing libertarian-universalistic and traditionalist-communitarian values. An analysis using data from the media coverage of election campaigns confirms that the New Left and the populist right represent polar normative ideals in France, Austria, and Switzerland. A similar transformation of political space occurred in the absence of a right-wing populist party in Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands. In these contexts, the author hypothesises the value conflict to prove less durable and polarising in the longer run. The analysis of an election in the mid 2000s confirms that party systems evolve in a path dependent manner in the two contexts.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the second phase of the research project ‘National Political Change in a Globalizing World’, namely, Marc Helbling, Dominic Höglinger, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Bruno Wüescht in Zurich, as well as Martin Dolezal, Swen Hutter, and Edgar Grande in Munich, for sharing their new data with me. Special thanks go to Bruno Wüescht for his help in preparing the data. Furthermore, I thank Kevin Deegan-Krause and Zsolt Enyedi, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their most valuable comments and suggestions. It goes without saying that I exempt them from the responsibility of any remaining errors.

Notes

1. Extreme right-wing populist parties from the 1990s on can be distinguished from other parties by virtue of three commonalities: (i) a location at the traditionalist-communitarian extreme of the new cultural divide; (ii) a populist anti-establishment discourse, in which they draw a dividing line between themselves and the established parties, and (iii) a hierarchical internal structure which sets them apart from pluralist parties. It is only for the sake of brevity that I occasionally drop the label ‘extreme’ in identifying these parties.

2. Following Kitschelt's (1994) as well as Flanagan and Lee's (2003) usage, I use the term ‘libertarian’ to denote a culturally liberal position compatible with an interventionist state, and not as an all-embracing call for a minimal state, as in Nozick's (1974) conception.

3. While some of the New Social Movements of the left have also showed affinities to communitarian thinking, their conception of community emphasises individual autonomy based on universalistic values, and thus refers to quite different strands of communitarian thought than those outlined here.

4. The earliest time-point for France is 1988 because presidential elections there are less frequent than the parliamentary ones analysed in the other cases. This turns out to be fortunate due to the country's role as a forerunner of the developments found later in other countries.

5. The position of the Free Democrats (FDP) in terms of the state–market cleavage is unexpected and due to their strong advocacy of budgetary rigour. The latter's location, in turn, is due to the fact that budgetary rigour was more strongly endorsed by the SPD and Ecologists than by the Union parties in this election. Because the Left Party did not strongly advocate its reservations regarding budgetary rigour, it is (misleadingly) located close to the ‘budget’ category (see explanations in the research design section).