Party Family Research Articles

The impact of sector employment on party choice: A comparative study of eight West European countries

Abstract. In this article, the impact of sector employment on party choice in eight West European countries is examined. The empirical analysis is organised into three parts. First, the impact of sector on party choice treated as a nominal‐level variable is analysed. Then the impact of sector within various social classes is focused upon, and finally sector employment is considered in relation to the division between socialist and non‐socialist parties. The impact of sector employment is large in Denmark; moderate in Britain, France and Italy; small in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands; and insignificant in Ireland. The impact of sector employment is much greater within the service class than any of the other social classes. The party families of the left, and also the greens, get stronger support from the public employees, while the main party families among the non‐socialist parties, apart from the Christian Democrats, get strongest support from private‐sector employees. Sector employment is most strongly correlated with socialist/non‐socialist party division in Denmark followed by France and Britain, with only minor or insignificant correlation in the other countries.

Federalism and the European party system

Applying a framework from comparative federalism to the European party system requires examining the ways in which the European and national party systems are linked, through congruent or incongruent party system structures and through party organizations that either integrate or separate the two arenas of political competition. The European party system exhibits two forms of incongruence. The first is a high degree of party strength in some national party systems for parties that lie outside the ideological range of the core party families in the European Parliament. The second is the emergence of parties that compete only in European parliamentary elections on European issues, signalling the politicization of a European integration cleavage.

Is extreme right‐wing populism contagious? Explaining the emergence of a new party family

Abstract. This article presents a new model for explaining the emergence of the party family of extreme right‐wing populist parties in Western Europe. As the old master frame of the extreme right was rendered impotent by the outcome of the Second World War, it took the innovation of a new, potent master frame before the extreme right was able to break electoral marginalization. Such a master frame – combining ethnonationalist xenophobia, based on the doctrine of ethnopluralism, with anti‐political‐establishment populism – evolved in the 1970s, and was made known as a successful frame in connection with the electoral breakthrough of the French Front National in 1984. This event started a process of cross‐national diffusion, where embryonic extreme right‐wing groups and networks elsewhere adopted the new frame. Hence, the emergence of similar parties, clustered in time (i.e., the birth of a new party family) had less to do with structural factors influencing different political systems in similar ways as with cross‐national diffusion of frames. The innovation and diffusion of the new master frame was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the emergence of extreme right‐wing populist parties. In order to complete the model, a short list of different political opportunity structures is added.

The nationalization of politics: the formation of national electorates and party systems in Western Europe

This comparative and long-term in-depth analysis studies the macro-historical process of the nationalization of politics. Using a large wealth of newly collected and unexplored data on single constituencies in 17 West European countries, the analysis reconstructs the territorial structures of electoral participation and support for political parties, as well as their evolution since the mid-nineteenth century from highly territorialised politics of early competitive elections toward nation-wide alignments. It provides a multi-pronged empirical analysis through time, across countries, and between party families. The inclusion of all the most importan social and political cleavages (class, state-church, rural-urban, ethno-linguistic, and religious) allows to assess the nationalising impact of the left-right dimension that emerged from the National and Industrial Revolutions, and the resistance of pre-industrial cultural and centre-periphery factors to national integration. State formation, institutional, and socio-political mobilisation models are combined with actor-centered explanatory factors to account for key evolutionary steps and differences between national types of territorial configurations of the vote.

Cleavage-based voting behavior in cross-national perspective: evidence from six postwar democracies

We investigate trends and cross-national variation in the impact of class, religious, and gender cleavages on voting behavior in six advanced capitalist democracies in the postwar period. Earlier research on cleavage voting has been criticized for utilizing outdated “two-class” models of class structure, simplistic left/right party distinctions, flawed statistical approaches, and incompatible and/or limited of cross-national empirical evidence. We take such criticisms seriously and seek to overcome them. Using multinomial logistic regression models, we analyze data from a new dataset, the International Social Cleavages and Politics (ISCP) file, which contains comparable, over-time cross-national data from 112 nationally representative election surveys of voters in six Western democracies in the period 1964–1998. The six countries examined in the paper (Australia, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States) are unique because of the existence of time series data available for all three cleavages. Our analyses examine the changing magnitude of the class, religion, and gender cleavages for up to five distinct party families for each country. Unskilled workers have become less distinctive in their partisan alignments over time, but other classes have experienced offsetting changes, yielding little evidence of a universal decline in the class cleavage. Further analyses suggest an important degree of stability in the aggregated effects of all social cleavages, while also revealing significant cross-national differences and trends in the magnitude of specific cleavages. These results refine debates concerning the possible decline of social cleavages; implications for research are discussed in conclusion.

An alternative approach for defining the boundaries of ‘party families’: examples from the Israeli extreme right‐wing party scene

For many years the ‘party family’ concept has been utilised by scholars for the purpose of classifying political parties across both countries and time. Like many other concepts in political science, the ‘party family’ idea is widely used, yet has suffered from a certain level of ambiguity. In this study, we try to clarify and re‐emphasise the importance of the ‘party family’ concept. We do so by offering an integrative approach for the classification of ‘party families’. This approach brings together two different theoretical schools (the ideological and the sociological approaches) for classifying ‘party families’, and also combines various methodologies (qualitative content analysis, ecological analysis and survey‐based quantitative analysis) as essential tools for defining ‘party families’. The deeply polarised party system in Israel, and especially the expanding extreme right‐wing ‘party family’ in the country, serve as our case study. The decision to focus only on one political system is meant to illustrate the importance of the ‘party family’ concept, not only for its common use as a tool in the comparative classification of parties across countries and time but also for the study of single‐party systems which are characterised by multi‐partism or polarised pluralism.

Reconsidering Nordic Party Space1

The erosion of the social and economic bases underlying traditional party systems has led analysts to search for new cleavage structures undergirding the present party systems. Meanwhile, analysts have identified a range of issue dimensions that also bear on voters’ party preferences. This article studies the degree to which grid‐group theory's four political biases of hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism, and fatalism can make inroads into the left–right dimension's stronghold in accounting for voters’ party preference. The analysis draws on a 1999 survey in the five Nordic countries (N= 4,832). The method combines voters’ party preferences with their scores on issue dimensions, or political dimensions. Analyses show that conventional party families, with one exception, are not identified along any of the five political orientations. Only the five conservative parties are exclusively identified as a party family on the left–right dimension. Party preference is more closely associated with the left–right dimension than the political biases. Sweden has the purest and simplest party cleavage, whereas Denmark has the most composite one. Across the Nordic countries, the green party family is most dissimilar, whereas the progress siblings are most alike. The left–right dimension accounts well for differences between parties within polities, whereas political biases, and egalitarianism in particular, account well for differences between parties of similar origin across polities.

The Dutch Parliamentary Elections in 2002 and 2003: The Rise and Decline of the Fortuyn Movement

During the Dutch parliamentary elections of 2002, the new party ‘List of Pim Fortuyn’ (LPF) has won 26 seats mainly at the cost of the governing parties: next to D66, the PvdA and the VVD, which both hoped to win the elections. After the election, these parties had become smaller than CDA and LPF. Why could one ‘newcomer’ without a well-developed party organization gain such a smashing electoral victory? We argue that who wants to understand Fortuyn's victory should study his victims, i.e. the ‘established’ main parties on the left and right of the Dutch party system. We argue that the programmatic convergence of the established parties has made them look more similar and therefore almost indistinguishable in the eyes of many voters. This has reinforced the feeling of many voters that the established parties form merely a ‘cartel’ without having a sense for the problems of ordinary citizens, let alone the capacity to solve them. In addition, the ongoing rise of electoral volatility in the Netherlands shaped the room for ‘catching’ this segment of the Dutch electorate. Fortuyn effectively used this discontent by means of right-wing populism. Although he was often pictured as a right-wing extremist, this is not a convincing argument when his party programme is compared with other European parties that are considered either as ‘conservative’ or as part of the emerging ‘new right’ party family. The dramatic decline in votes of the LPF in the elections of January 2003 does not mean that the impact of this party has vanished. Rather the programmatic positions of the main parties were affected by the rise of the LPF. Most parties have moved further to the right of the party system in 2003 in order to become more attractive to voters who voted for the LPF in 2002.

National Political Parties and European Integration

We test competing explanations for party positionlng on the issue of Euro? pean integration over the period 1984 to 1996 and find that the ideological location of a party in a party family is a powerful predictor of its position on this issue. Party family is a stronger influence than strategic competition, national location, participation in government, or the position of a party's supporters. We conclude that political parties have bounded rationalities that shape how they process incentives in competitive party sys? tems. Political cleavages give rise to ideological commitments or prisms through which political parties respond to new issues, including Euro? pean integration.

The Europeanisation of Green Parties: Exploring the EU's Impact

The use of the concept 'Europeanisation' has burgeoned, though its link with party adaptation and change is still under-explored. This article concedes the difficulties, outlined recently by Peter Mair and others, of linking Europeanisation and party change. However, it suggests that a more modest but systematic examination of the EU's impact on one party family (European Green parties) reveals both empirical and conceptual insights. Examining the Europeanisation of Green parties across several dimensions (party ideology, institutions and transnational activities) this article argues that Europeanisation has accelerated the mellowing of Green ideology and 'professionalisation' of Green party politics.

European Integration and Ethnoregionalist Parties

This article examines the impact of Europeanization on ethnoregionalist parties in Europe. In contrast to other European party families, traditionally this family has been characterized by the lack of ideological affinity and major differences in two dimensions - demands for political autonomy and traditional ideological orientations - that in the past jeopardized collective action and political cooperation. We argue that the process of Europeanization allowed the very constitution of a European party family from scratch. The article singles out the effects of Europeanization: the creation of a new structure of political opportunities for nationalist parties, changes in party behaviour at the European level, the definition of a new European internationalism and a common political European agenda based on the principle of the lowest common denominator.

Court-Ordered Third Party Visitation and Family Autonomy

Court-Ordered Third Party Visitation and Family Autonomy

Similar but Different?

Due to their grassroots orientation and their pan-European approach, green parties in Europe have been more sceptical towards EU integration than other European party families. As a result, their transnational party organization, the European Federation of Green Parties (EFGP), is not restricted to parties coming from EU member states. In this respect they differ from other important party families in Europe. On the other hand, the EFGP and its predecessor organization took on tasks related to the political system of the EU, such as the elaboration of platforms for the European elections or the incorporation of the green group in the European Parliament into a transnational party structure, as early as the mid-1980s. This makes the greens more similar to the other party families than has been previously supposed. Although major steps have been taken during the last 18 years with regard to transnational party cooperation, the greens have not yet managed to establish a real European party, however.

Α comparison of alternative techniques for prediction of the fauna of running‐water sites in Great Britain

1. Early versions of the river invertebrate prediction and classification system (RIVPACS) used TWINSPAN to classify reference sites based on the macro‐invertebrate fauna, followed by multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) for prediction of the fauna to be expected at new sites from environmental variables. This paper examines some alternative methods for the initial site classification and a different technique for prediction.2. A data set of 410 sites from RIVPACS II was used for initial screening of seventeen alternative methods of site classification. Multiple discriminant analysis was used to predict classification group from environmental variables.3. Five of the classification–prediction systems which showed promise were developed further to facilitate prediction of taxa at species and at Biological Monitoring Working Party (BMWP) family level.4. The predictive capability of these new systems, plus RIVPACS II, was tested on an independent data set of 101 sites from locations throughout Great Britain.5. Differences between the methods were often marginal but two gave the most consistently reliable outputs: the original TWINSPAN method, and the ordination method semi‐strong hybrid multidimensional scaling (SSH) followed by K‐means clustering.6. Logistic regression, an alternative approach to prediction which does not require the prior development of a classification system, was also examined. Although its performance fell within the range offered by the other five systems tested, it conveyed no advantages over them.7. This study demonstrated that several different multivariate methods were suitable for developing a reliable system for predicting expected probability of occurrence of taxa. This is because the prediction system involves a weighted average smoothing across site groupings.8. Hence, the two most promising procedures for site classification, coupled to MDA, were both used in the exploratory analyses for RIVPACS III development, which utilized over 600 reference sites.

Dimensions and alignments in european union politics: Cognitive constraints and partisan responses

Abstract. As the European Union (EU) has evolved, the study agenda has shifted from ‘European integration’ to ‘EU politics’. Missing from this new agenda, however, is an understanding of the ‘cognitive constraints’ on actors and how actors respond, i.e. the shape of the EU ‘political space’ and the location of social groups and competition between actors within this space. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the shape of the EU political space (the interaction between an Integration–Independence and Left–Right dimension and the location of class and sectoral groups within this map), and tests this framework on the policy positions of the Socialist, Christian Democrat and Liberal party leaders between 1976 and 1994 (using the techniques of the ECPR Party Manifestos Group Project). The research finds that the two dimensions were salient across the whole period, explains why the party families converged on pro–European positions by the 1990s and discovers the emergence of a triangular ‘core’ of EU politics.

Party Families and Democratic Performance: Extraparliamentary vs. Parliamentary Group Power

Party Families and Democratic Performance: Extraparliamentary vs. Parliamentary Group Power

THE PARTY FAMILY AND ITS STUDY

▪ Abstract Although the notion of the party family, with the various cross-national and cross-temporal similarities it implies, underlies much of the standard work on comparative party politics, it nevertheless remains one of the most under-theorized and least specified approaches to the general classification of parties. Four of the principal approaches that are used to identify party families are discussed: origins and sociology, transnational links, policy and ideology, and party name. The advantages and disadvantages of each approach are assessed, as are some of the more generic problems that may be associated with all four approaches. The two approaches that appear best suited to the specification and classification of party families are those based on the origin of parties and their ideology, but these should be developed in parallel rather than as alternatives. Both tap into what parties are rather than what parties do and hence are more likely to uncover core identities and shared political goals.

Party Politics and Family Policy

The Family and Medical Leave Act offers an excellent case study of a family policy that became embroiled in partisan conflict. The Democratic authors of the bill proposed an extensive leave period available to most workers. Arguing that the policy would pose hardships for businesses, Republicans severely diluted the original legislation, reducing the leave period and eliminating many workers from coverage. The resulting bill offered less support to working parents than leave policies in most other countries. The article opens with a description of problematic features of the bill that derive from partisan politics and then places the drafting of the bill in historical context. The story of the bill's passage is then discussed, highlighting the role of parties and interest groups, especially business organizations. The article concludes by providing a larger analysis of the leave debate.

Mapping the Nordic Party Space

The left‐right positions of the political parties in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland are compared from the late 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s. To locate the parties, survey data on the voters' self‐placements along the left‐right continuum are used. In order to study changes in the left‐right polarity and the degree of consensus along the left‐right continuum in each of the countries, we use the mean party positions to calculate three different measures of party distances. The wing party distance is that between the party farthest to the left and the party farthest to the right. The rival party distance is that between the Social Democratic Party and the traditional Conservative Party. Finally, the mean party distance is the average distance between all pairs of parties. One of the main conclusions is that in Sweden and Iceland the left‐right continuum seems to contract, whereas in Norway and Denmark the left‐right polarity and the distances between the parties are increasing. In today's Nordic party space, the distance between left and right is longest in Denmark and shortest in Norway. Eventually, 39 Nordic parties are brought together on the same left‐right scale. The analysis reveals that there are some clearly distinguishable clusters of parties or party families in the Nordic countries, such as, for example, the socialist parties, the social democratic parties and the conservative parties. Other party groups differ greatly in left‐right position, like the progressive parties, the liberal parties and the centre parties.

The war of words defining the extreme right party family

This article presents an overview of the writings on the extreme right party family of the third wave (1980–95). First, the prime criterion for the classification of the party family is discussed. Second, the main critiques of, and alternatives to, the term right‐wing extremism are evaluated. Third, the political parties that are generally considered to be members of the party family are identified. Fourth, subgroups within the larger party family are examined. In the conclusion, the various writings are structured on the basis of four theoretical schools within the broader study of right‐wing extremism.