Issue salience and party competition in Southern Europe before and after the Euro crisis: the primacy of the economy holding back cultural issues

ABSTRACT

Did the crisis period influence party issue salience on the two main dimensions of conflict – economic and cultural – in Europe? How did this happen in terms of potential differences between Southern European countries, the most exposed to economic depression and austerity, and the rest of Europe? And what can we learn about all this when we look at the parties themselves and consider party-level determinants of issue salience? In answering these questions, this study investigates continuity and change in party issue salience over time, comparing Southern Europe with the rest of Europe between 2000 and 2018. Using manifesto data, we test hypotheses on the relevance of the economic crisis for issue salience in party competition and the intermediary role of party characteristics in one of the most turbulent areas of recent times. We show that in Southern Europe, during the Great Recession, the socio-economic cleavage contained the ascendance of a socio-cultural dimension and that party-level characteristics are important in conditioning responses to the crisis in terms of issue salience. To pursue the argument, we combine insights from saliency theory and accounts of party strategic adaptation.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Emmanouil Tsatsanis and José Real-Dato for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We included Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK.

2 Pearson correlation between the two variables is −0.379. Appendix 1 reports the list of items used to build the two variables.

3 Graphs for the rest of Europe show that the economy was predominant over socio-cultural issues in several countries (Appendix 3). Especially if we consider North-Western Europe, our data then offer a more differentiated picture if compared to accounts emphasizing the supremacy of the integration-demarcation divide.

4 The findings presented in the following section hold if we exclude countries from Central-Eastern Europe and compare Southern with North-Western Europe (Appendix 7). Results do not substantively change if we drop Ireland, which was also severely hit by the crisis (Appendix 8), or Italy, which displayed a peculiar pattern in Figure 1 (Appendix 9).

5 As a robustness check, we modelled the impact of time in two additional ways. Firstly, we incorporated a dummy which is 0 for the 2000–2008 period and 1 from 2009 onwards, assessing possible differences between elections before the Great Recession and elections since the start of the crisis. Secondly, we included (as a quadratic function) a time indicator counting the number of days passed between 1 January 2000 and the election in which a party issued its manifesto. In neither case our main results change (Appendix 6).

6 We took left-right scores from Chapel Hill data in order to have a measure that is exogenous to the data used to build the dependent variable.

7 Appendix 4 reports the full list of parties coded as new. These were, e.g., Golden Dawn (Greece 2012), Five Star Movement (Italy 2013), Ciudadanos and Podemos (Spain 2015).

8 This variable is available only in the 2014 and 2017 waves. Each party was given a score based on the closest wave.

9 Southern European parties were expected to devote 23% of their manifesto to economic issues before the crisis, 32% during the crisis, and 31% after the crisis.

10 The results are very similar if we measure party ideology using a categorical variable (Appendix 13).

11 After the crisis, we found for example a greater emphasis by right-wing parties of Southern Europe on “National way of life: positive”.

12 For new parties in the rest of Europe, “Law and order: positive” was the second most salient issue before the crisis, while ranking only fifth after the outbreak of the crisis.

13 A T-test shows that the average score of anti-elitism is statistically greater for new parties (5.66) than for existing parties (4.22).

14 In analyses we do not report here, we found that this came at the expenses of socio-cultural issues, as incumbents prioritized the economy over socio-cultural topics. We also found that, in Southern Europe, incumbent parties put greater emphasis on the economy than the opposition especially during the crisis. In the rest of Europe, the greater emphasis placed by opposition parties on socio-cultural matters vanishes with the crisis, indicating that they were incentivized to increasingly adopt economy-based opposition strategies (Appendix 11). Moreover, after interacting incumbency with party ideology we found that the more right-wing opposition parties are, the higher is the emphasis put on socio-cultural issues, while the same does not happen for incumbent parties. In addition, both government and opposition parties tend to emphasize less the economy the more they are right-wing, especially in the rest of Europe (Appendix 12).

Additional information

Funding

Nicolò Conti and Andrea Pedrazzani would like to acknowledge the final support of the 2015 PRIN Project of the Italian Ministry of Education: Grant Number Prot. 2015P7RCL5 - ‘Politics and policy in Europe in times of crisis: Causes and consequences’.