Introduction

Toward the middle of the 19th century parliamentary representative institutions began replacing absolute regimes throughout Europe in the wake of the democratic revolutions that spread across the continent in successive waves. Albeit at different moments and paces – and often with reversals – competitive elections became the means by which representation in newly created parliaments was organized, executive power held accountable, and increasingly large segments of society incorporated in the political sphere through the right to vote.

Classical accounts of the formation of political parties as the main organizations and actors in the new “invention” of representative democracy (Manin, 1997), and party systems, that is sets of cooperating and competing parties, have described their rapid development across Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Duverger's analysis (1954) pointed to the difference between parties of “internal” and “external” origin; the former, liberals and conservatives, based on the mobilization of elites within parliaments under conditions of restricted suffrage and majoritarian elections; the latter, socialists and agrarians, based on the mobilization of the masses incorporated later through the extension of the franchise. The cleavage model presented in Chapter 2 pointed to the socio-economic and cultural origin of party families as they emerged from fundamental conflicts created by the disruption of the old political and social order through the National and Industrial Revolutions.

Long-term historical analyses of democratic and electoral development in Europe – be it democratization and enfranchisement, the birth of party competition and partisan oppositions, or systemic properties such as volatility and nationalization – are characterized by two, in part contrasting, features. On one hand, these accounts point to commonalities, similarities, and simultaneous patterns of change over time. On the other hand, they point to variations and differences across European countries and to country-specific deviations from the general pattern. The analysis in Part II of this volume addresses the question of the balance between these two tendencies from an empirical and quantitative perspective using a variety of indicators tailored to capture the multi-dimensionality of the concept of Europeanization as specified in Chapter 1.

Introduction

Since the first pioneering electoral analyses carried out in the United States and Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, the commonality and simultaneity of electoral change has been considered an important indicator of the degree to which a political system is integrated. Common shifts of votes occurring between elections in all territorial areas of a political system mean that the system's parts move together and that everywhere its electorates respond similarly to common factors and issues. Such general simultaneous change of votes towards or away from party families points to an advanced degree of integration of political systems. This classical indicator of vote shifts allows assessing the presence of “waves” or “tides” of electoral change across Europe.

While in the past uniform change has been investigated across constituencies at the national level, this chapter uses this conceptual tool to analyze the formation of a Europe-wide electorate. The detection of waves can be interpreted as an indicator of a “Europeanized” electorate that refers to common supra-national issues, is affected by similar vote determinants, or undergoes similar structural change. When used at the level of national electorates and party systems, shifts of votes are considered an important indicator of the degree of “nationalization” of electoral politics. This chapter extends the use of this indicator to assess the degree of “Europeanization” of electoral politics. Insofar as one can detect common waves of change that take place simultaneously everywhere in Europe – or, at least, in most European political systems – we can speak of a Europeanized or integrated dimension of electoral politics.

To what extent is – in a long-term perspective – electoral change common and simultaneous in Europe? To what extent do national electorates move together in waves of change over the past century and a half? What are the most important waves in the past and how do recent waves compare to those fundamental transformations? Are the waves of the past mostly along the left–right axis while since the de- and re-alignment in the 1970s such waves take place along other dimensions of contestation?

Introduction

Empirical evidence presented in the five chapters of Part II provides ample support for the thesis of the Europeanization of politics. The crucial phases in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of the formation of party systems witness steady homogenization processes and simultaneous waves of change across the continent – in both Western and Central-Eastern Europe. Similar alignments are put in place which – in the past 30 years – have also permeated the EP. The ideological cohesiveness within Europe-wide party families has been high since World War II and it is likely that this indicator, too, has its roots in early periods of party systems’ formation. Executive politics has undergone cross-national convergence under the impact of the recent events of European integration and the end of the Cold War.

The main line of interpretation that transpires through the evidence points to the role of the left, that is the role of socialists and social democrats: “class politics” and the left–right cleavage. This is the dimension that, by structuring national party systems, is the fundamental feature of their similarity. Its emergence in the late 19th century represents the main swing which, up to the present time, has remained unparalleled. In its wake territorially differentiating factors of a cultural nature and pre-industrial age are replaced by a functional alignment cutting across territories. Social democrats appear as the most integrated party family and it is their ideological shift in the early 1990s that causes the convergence of cabinet politics. Europeanization is to a large extent the story of the left and its relationship to the market economy.

The goal of this chapter is to investigate more systematically the sources of Europeanization along the explanatory scheme sketched in Chapter 1.

In 1774 Edmund Burke, addressing the electors of Bristol, said:

Since its first use in the English parliament, representation was based on a territorial, geographical, indeed local principle. Burgesses and knights summoned by the king were representatives of towns and counties (the Commons). For long representation was imposed from above and with democratization the local geographical definition of representation did not change immediately (Morgan, 1988: 43–6). With Burke, however, representation acquires a new meaning: not the representation of particular interests from various territorial constituencies but, as famously stated in the same quote, the vision that “Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors” but rather the site where the same interests across territorial units – say, trade interests in places such as Bristol or Birmingham – are represented. Further, as Pitkin discussed in her seminal treatise on political representation, even towns or regions not enfranchised or represented territorially through a member of parliament may nonetheless be “virtually” represented in a communion of interests and feelings (Pitkin, 1967: 173). More recently, Manin too has written about the importance of representation being “national” rather than local in its historical development (Manin, 1997: 163). In the terminology used in this book, the functional dimension of representation, as opposed to the territorial one, predominates (see Chapter 1).

Historically, in national political systems the actors through which nationwide cross-local interests are represented since the earliest phases of democratization are political parties. Political parties have the role of aggregating the different interests in coherent programmes and ideologies but also of linking the different territorial bits of a country together – in other words, making national representation possible. This is done through the cross-district “linkage” or “coordination” of parties (Cox, 1999) or, what in a different terminology is referred to as their “nationalization, that is the progressive replacement of territorial divisions in the representation process through functional dimensions of contestation.

Introduction

The chapters so far have analyzed processes of cross-country convergence that the literature seen in Chapter 1 mostly traces back to within- and trans-country processes. This chapter introduces aspects that may be ranged under “top-down” effects, namely factors located at the supra-national level that affect countries in a similar way and thus create convergence. At the same time this chapter extends Chapter 6. While including an analysis of long-term trends since 1945, it focuses on Europeanization in the more usual definition of the impact of European integration on member-states. The hypothesis about the impact on cross-country convergence is addressed in an explanatory perspective. Beyond this impact, however, this chapter addresses further supra-national factors such as the breakdown of communist regimes in 1989 and the impact of such a momentous juncture on cross-country convergence.

Furthermore, while this book has so far focussed on the Europeanization of electorates and party systems, this chapter turns to the arena of cabinet and coalition politics. The move to the executive arena is needed first and foremost because the top-down effect from supra-national factors such as European integration is felt primarily in cabinets’ format and policy. It is at the level of cabinets and governmental coalitions that one observes programmatic changes that affect policy making. While small, extreme protest opposition parties are not called to translate their platforms into actual policies, programmes of parties with cabinet responsibility provide the basis for executive action.

Indeed, it is the programmatic action of cabinets that has been most affected by Europe-wide changes such as the end of the Cold War and European integration. On one hand, the breakdown of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe had the effect of de-radicalizing leftist politics and reducing the alternatives in foreign and economic policy. This has led to claims about the policy convergence through liberalizations and privatizations, as well as calls for a reduction of the welfare state and of general state intervention in the economy. On the other hand, the acceleration of the process of European integration since the Single European Act of 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 has constrained the margin for action on the part of national governments.

Introduction

Following three chapters on the Europeanization of party systems from the perspective of their “format”, the analysis in this and the next chapter turns to the perspective of their “contents”. One of the critiques made against studies of the national integration of parties and party systems is precisely that – in spite of similar levels of support and change over time – the content of the ideology and policy programmes of local “branches” are too different to consider them the “same” party. The names and symbols may be the same, but the local context imposes its constraints so that, say, the French Communist Party in Bretagne is a very different thing from the French Communist Party in the eastern banlieue of Paris.

The critique has been formulated against nationalization approaches, especially for some countries. In most cases, the strong centralization of party organizations at the national level and the fact that competition is national rather than local (or, more precisely, becomes national in the process of nationalization), makes cross-regional ideological variation rather unproblematic. At the European level the problem of “sameness” of parties of different countries bundled together in European party families, however, needs to be addressed in a systematic manner. The classification of national parties into families is the first step (seen in Chapter 2). The analysis of the ideological cohesiveness of parties belonging (or classified as belonging) to the same party family is the second step. This is the goal of the present chapter.

With Europeanization one observes homogenization of electoral support over time, similar cleavage structures and party systems across countries and across levels of governance, and simultaneity of change.

At the turn of the 20th century politics in Bulgaria was dominated by a large liberal party representing the democratically oriented bourgeoisie and independent entrepreneurs who favoured constitutionalism, parliamentarism, and social policies while the main opposition was constituted by conservatives of the richer upper classes and clergy. These elitarian parties ruled until World War I when the challenge coming from the parties of the “masses” – the socialist BRSDP and the agrarian BZNS – became majoritarian among the enfranchised male electorate, only to be in turn overtaken as soon as 1920 by the Bulgarian Communist Party. An unstable party system consisting of socialists, agrarians, and communists on the left and liberals and conservatives on the right managed to survive until 1931 – the last democratic election until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Such early party system development is typical of Europe and appears in classical accounts of political parties from Ostrogorski (1902), to Michels (1911), Duverger (1954), and Rokkan (1970), among many others. In fact, it is the story of most European party systems whether of Britain and its early parliamentarism; of Germany, Italy, and Switzerland as they formed from the struggle for national unification; of Austria and Hungary and the other nations emerging from the break-up of multi-national empires in Central and Eastern Europe; or of the Nordic countries. Indeed, a contemporary commentator simply described the Bulgarian party system as “European”. The early opposition between liberals and conservatives during the periods of restricted suffrage, the rise of parties of mass mobilization with the extension of franchise to workers and peasants, the division of the left into socialists and communists after the Soviet Revolution of 1917, and even the breakdown of democracy under totalitarian ideologies in the 1930s are common features of electoral history during the constituent phases of European party systems. Such commonality persists in later phases of electoral development after World War II with the rise of Christian democracy and the welfare state, the new politics of emancipatory values eventually leading to green parties, and the radical-right politics of anti-globalization and anti-immigration which have recently manifested in populist parties throughout the continent.

In 2004 The Nationalization of Politics was published, a book on the formation of national electorates and party systems from the 19th century until the present time. In concluding that study I hinted at one possible, natural continuation of that line of work – namely, the analysis of the incipient supra-national integration and formation in Europe of electorates and party systems; their “Europeanization” as it were.

The present volume is a step in that direction. One of the lessons, perhaps the main one, from the nationalization study was that – within the boundaries of the nation-state, the most important political unit over the past two centuries – politics transformed from territorial to functional, with non-territorial dimensions of contestation (first and foremost the left–right class cleavage) overwhelming and replacing territorial ones. With the blurring of national boundaries through European integration, the question is whether today “nationalization at the European level” is taking place along the same lines of nation-states at an earlier stage of political development. Research for this volume, however, soon showed that, rather than “incipient”, electorates and party systems have long been “Europeanized”.

This study thus investigates in a long-term and historical perspective the extent to which electoral politics (voting behaviour, party systems, ideological families) transforms from national, that is centred on national-territorial specificities, to European, with alignments cutting across national units. Similarly to the work on the nationalization of politics, it is an analysis of democratic integration. Europeanization is operationalized as homogeneity among nation-states in Europe and uniform, simultaneous electoral shifts. Further, it is defined in terms of ideological cohesion among parties of the same family across Europe and of vertical correspondence between national and European electoral arenas. Also similarly to the work on nationalization, this study challenges the conventional view that such integration began after World War II. It shows, on the contrary, that the Europeanization of electoral politics is a much longer process, starting in the 19th century, and that a European electorate has long existed and manifested itself through common and simultaneous “waves” of change across the continent – both Western and Central-Eastern Europe.

The analysis presented in this book is based on four types of data:

• Aggregate data (electoral results): For national elections, the source is a new updated database compiled for the present study based on previous efforts in historical data collection (for the election of sources on Western Europe see Caramani, 2000: 1017–53; on Central and Eastern Europe the main source is Nohlen and Stöver, 2010). For elections to the European Parliament (EP) since 1979 the main source is the European Database at NSD in Bergen.

• Individual data (surveys): The sources of data are Eurobarometers (EB, Mannheim Trend File) and European Social Surveys (ESS).

• Text data (party manifestos): The source of data is the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). See Budge et al. (2001) and Klingemann et al. (2006), as well as online updates.

• Membership data (cabinet composition): The source of data is the ParlGov database (Döring and Manow, 2010).