Abstract
Polarization is not new in Europe. Looking at electoral support for radical political forces after the Second World War, one can observe how polarization has been on the rise since the 1960s. Still, it is in the 1990s, with the thaw of European party systems and the subsequent emergence of (populist) radical parties, that the percentage of votes for anti-political establishment parties reached unprecedented levels. In this article, we not only show the general (country-level) picture but also highlight both the consequences and causes of polarization, proposing at the same time some potential remedies to combat it. Using an aggregate, longitudinal unique dataset, containing 47 European countries across more than 170 years from 1848 to 2020 (Casal Bértoa, 2021;Casal Bértoa and Enyedi, 2021), we try to shed light here on the perils of polarization for the quality of democracy, how traditional political parties are to be blamed, and how we can tackle the problem.
Highlights
POLARIZATION OVER EUROPEA specter is haunting Europe, the specter of polarization
In the current article, influenced by Sartori’s (1976) and Dodd’s (1976) theorizing about the negative impact of anti-systemic parties, we look at electoral polarization, measured as the percentage of votes obtained by anti-political-establishment parties (APEp)
In a recent work Zagórski et al (2021), using an original dataset for 20 Western European countries from the late 19th century until the end of 2019, show that the percentage of support for APEp is negatively correlated with the level of electoral turnout, traditionally used as an indicator of the healthy functioning of democracy in a country
Summary
POLARIZATION OVER EUROPEA specter is haunting Europe, the specter of polarization. In the last decade, the percentage of votes for anti-political-establishment parties (APEp) (Abedi, 2002; 2004), be they populist (Rooduijn et al, 2020), anti-system (Zulianello, 2019), protest (Morlino and Raniolo, 2017), radical (Funke et al, 2016), and/or extreme (Carter, 2005), has exponentially increased.
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