Introduction

In previous chapters, we showed that globalization has led to new political potentials on the demand side, and that these potentials have restructured political mobilization in turn. The patterns of change differ significantly when we focus on particular sites of political mobilization, however. The protest politics arena continues to be far more shaped by issues, such as cultural liberalism and environment, which emerged during the 1970s and 1980s, than does the electoral arena. During those years, the driving forces of political change were located on the political left in general and in new social movements more specifically. Since the 1990s, the momentum has shifted to the right (Kitschelt 1995), with its driving force, the populist radical right, forcefully restructuring party competition. While the main ‘new’ issues linked to globalization, namely immigration and Europe, seem to be more salient in electoral politics, protest politics is mainly the site of those who try to counter the rise of the radical right.

The main goal here is to elaborate these cross-arena differences and explain differing patterns of change. We do so by focusing on the relationship between electoral and protest politics, and argue that the shift from left to right is the source of the differing development paths the conflict structures have taken in electoral as compared to protest politics. We think there are different logics at work. The left waxes and wanes at the same time in both arenas, while, for the right, when its actors and issue positions become more salient in one arena, their salience decreases in the other one. We trace these differences back to the different value orientations and strategies of the actors involved.

The main argument: restructuring political conflict

West European politics is in flux. In the last five decades, it has been the object of two major waves of change. The first wave started in the 1960s and resulted in a profound transformation in political values, styles of political participation, and modes of political organization. Its manifestations include post-materialist values, an increase in unconventional political participation, new social movements, and Green parties. Although these developments have not been the explicit objects of study in this book, their continuing relevance has been clearly demonstrated in several chapters. In the electoral arena, the cultural dimension of political conflict is very much determined by new issues of cultural liberalism (see Chapter 4), the protest arena is still dominated by the issues and actors created by the first transformation (see Chapter 6), and Green parties certainly contribute to the fragmentation and polarization of West European party systems. These changes have been treated extensively in the scholarly literature, and there is a wealth of empirical evidence as to their relevance and transformative power (Dalton et al. 1984; Flanagan 1987; Inglehart 1977, 1990; Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Kriesi 1993).

The rise of ‘new politics’ is only part of the story, however. For a full understanding of the restructuring of West European politics, we need to give special attention to a second wave of changes which has been either neglected or misinterpreted in the literature on new politics and value change. This second wave set in during the 1980s and was produced by completely different actors articulating markedly different issues (Kriesi 1999). A new type of radical populist right, mobilizing against immigration and European integration, has been the driving force of this second transformation of West European politics, as the analyses in the current book show.

Introduction

This chapter offers an account of the actors' positioning in public debates, complementing the first and second parts of the book that dealt with how the new cleavage is structured in party politics and the protest arena. Most importantly, we will explore which actors are pivotal contenders in public debates on the three crucial issues of globalization: immigration, European integration, and economic liberalization. Further, we will identify the cleavage coalitions that emerge from the basis of the actors' positions as well as the coalitions' framing of the integration-demarcation divide.

As discussed in Chapter 8, public debates cover all arenas. This allows us to include the full variety of relevant actors engaging in conflicts over globalization in the analyses. The extension of the array of actors, however, raises important questions with regard to the analysis of the actor constellations in the new cleavage. First, it is unclear whether the new actors can be easily integrated into the two-dimensional space found in previous analyses. Second, whereas we looked at the consistency of actors' positions across arenas in Chapter 8, we will analyse the general positioning of actors in debates and the ways in which they differ across the economic and cultural aspects of the globalization debates. In addition, this chapter explains whether the articulation of the losers' potential varies substantially across countries.

Introduction

This chapter analyses the framing of the three public debates over globalization and the thematic structure of these crucial issues of the new cleavage. How do political actors justify their opposition and support of globalization, and, ultimately, how do they cue citizens' views? Throughout this volume, we have suggested that the new cleavage is driven by two different logics, an economic one and a cultural one. The economic logic articulates opposition to globalization by emphasizing the negative consequences of economic competition, and by reframing cultural and political conflicts in such a way as to intensify economic confrontation. The cultural logic, by contrast, stresses the negative consequences of cultural diversity and political integration, and interprets economic conflicts related to globalization in cultural terms. Our principal aim in analysing the framing of the globalization debates is to see where and under what circumstances the cultural logic or the economic logic comes to prevail.

So far, we largely have taken for granted – based on theoretical considerations and the actual location of the issues in the political space – that immigration and European integration are dominated by the cultural logic and that the economic logic prevails in the case of economic liberalization. However, the three issues are potentially multi-faceted, and we therefore expect substantial differences in the way the new cleavage is articulated not only across but also within issues. In a first step, the present chapter sets out to open these ‘black boxes’ of the three globalization issues by breaking them up into the relevant sub-issues. This more fine-grained conceptualization will enable us to formulate more specific expectations regarding the predominant logic, which we can then assess empirically.

Introduction

In this chapter, we compare the demand side of national and European elections, as well as of protest politics, in the early twenty-first century. In contrast to our previous studies (Lachat 2008; Lachat and Dolezal 2008), we are interested not only in the socio-structural foundations for issue positions and their electoral consequences, but also in who participates politically and in which modes. We want to know whether globalization ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ enter more forcefully into the various arenas of political mobilization. Can we detect substantial differences in socio-structural characteristics and issue positions across the arenas observed?

A political line of conflict can only be called a cleavage if it is based on societal divisions (Bartolini and Mair 1990: 213–249). We expect globalization ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ to be opposed to one another along the new integration–demarcation cleavage, and are here interested in how the ‘new’ issues are embedded in the demand side of the political space. Is there still a close link between collective political actors and certain parts of the new societal divide?

Asking ‘who participates?’ raises important questions about the quality of democracy in the twenty-first century. We focus on political equality in an outcome-oriented sense, in line with research on participation (e.g. Teorell et al. 2007a; Verba and Nie 1972; Verba et al. 1995), and explore whether certain preferences of the public and needs of societal groups are unequally represented in the electoral or protest arenas. Our analysis describes inequalities in expressed needs and preferences and links them to the new political potentials brought about by globalization. The question of ‘who takes part’ or who is being organized into politics focuses on the emergence of political dividing lines and is a key question in the theory of cleavages (Bartolini 2000; Rokkan 2000).

Introduction

In the preceding chapters we analysed how the impact of globalization restructured electoral and protest politics – two political arenas occupied mainly by political parties and social movement organizations. Struggles over national boundaries, however, take place in a larger range of arenas and involve a wider array of actors. To address this broader scope of political conflict related to globalization, we look at the integration–demarcation cleavage from a different perspective in this third part of our volume. More specifically, we switch from an analysis of specific arenas to a comprehensive analysis of public debates, which encompasses all potentially relevant arenas and actors and focuses on the three issues central to the new cleavage, namely immigration, economic liberalization, and European integration.

A public debate includes all communication related to a particular issue and is therefore independent of the arena in which it occurs. A public debate is the sum of all public communication related to a particular issue in a process of argument and counter-argument. This definition is close to what Ferree et al. (2002: 9) call ‘public discourse’: ‘public communication about topics and actors related to either some particular policy domain or to the broader interests and values that are engaged’.

Introduction

In this chapter, we take up the analysis of the supply side where we left off in our previous volume (Kriesi et al. 2008). Our goal is to test whether our sweeping generalizations hold up when confronted with data that include later national elections in our six countries. The addition of new data allows us to distinguish between the 1990s and the 2000s, and to analyse developments over time. We are freed from the vicissitudes of political conjunctures in individual elections, given that we have at least two elections in both the 1990s and the 2000s to work with (see Table 2.1). We are now in a position to identify long-term trends in the structural configuration of national political space better than we were before.

We begin by analysing the overall structural transformation of national political space in Western Europe. As before, our analysis is based on content analysis of electoral campaign coverage in the major daily newspapers in the six countries (see Chapter 2 for details). We have sufficient data on 92 parties from our six countries.

In a first step, we include all parties in the same analysis. By situating the parties from all six countries, independently of national specificities, we can identify in a common West European space the overall structure of that particular space. This presupposes that the meaning of a given issue category (such as opposition to immigration) is roughly comparable across countries – an assumption that may not hold up for every case. Nevertheless, we believe it is not far off the mark for most issue-party combinations in our six countries.

Introduction

This volume is a continuation and extension of our previous study on West European politics in the age of globalization (Kriesi et al. 2008). Aspects of continuity prevail with respect to the main theoretical questions introduced in Chapter 1, but we now analyse how the integration–demarcation cleavage manifests itself in various political arenas. We extend the research design as well as the empirical programme to include elections to the European Parliament and non-institutionalized forms of political participation, hence political protest, in the analysis. Furthermore, we have updated our data on national elections, and we scrutinize public debates about the three issues central to globalization processes: immigration, economic liberalization, and European integration.

We primarily deal with the programmes political and other actors offer, and hence with the supply side; our analysis of citizens' attitudes is restricted to Chapter 3. As we rely on secondary data sources and common statistical procedures to explore demand, the chapter at hand focuses on the most important aspects of how we study the supply side of political competition. However, the expression of protest transcends this dichotomy somewhat, as our analysis of political protest is neither wholly supply-oriented nor entirely demand-oriented.

Introduction

What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And, more specifically, how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts?

For answering these questions we take as our starting point the political sociology framework of Stein Rokkan, which is firmly based on the assumption that the scope of political conflicts is defined and contained by national boundaries (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; see Rokkan 1999). In the process of nation-building, political conflicts are transformed from local or regional conflicts into national ones; and in those cases in which the former persist they are the basis of a new type of conflict between the national centre and the periphery. In modern democracies, electorates have become national electorates and the most relevant political parties are national parties constituting national party systems (Bartolini 2000a; Caramani 2004). In the present volume, we continue our endeavour to place the current process of globalization in such a Rokkanean perspective. We conceive of the contemporary transformation of territorial boundaries as a new ‘critical juncture’ which results in the formation of a new structural conflict between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalization or ‘denationalization’.

This book is the second major outcome of an exciting scientific collaboration on the political consequences of globalization that started in the early 2000s. It continues and builds upon the work of West European Politics in the Age of Globalization, in which we examined the emergence of a new cleavage and the transformation of party systems in six West European countries (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK). In a somewhat different composition, the two teams of political scientists at the universities of Zurich and Munich have extended the analysis of the restructuration of West European politics in the years from 2005 until the end of 2009. The team leaders – Hanspeter Kriesi and Edgar Grande – are still the same. From the original team, Martin Dolezal is also still part of the current set of authors. Marc Helbling, Dominic Höglinger, Swen Hutter, and Bruno Wüest have joined the team for the second phase of the project, on which the analyses we present in this volume are based. For this second phase, we again received generous support from the German Research Foundation (SFB 536 – Project C5), and from the Swiss National Science Foundation (100017–111756).

For the present volume, we collected fresh data on national elections, which we now cover up to and including 2007. In addition, we extended our analysis in three directions: we added European elections to the national elections, we included political protest in our analyses, and we innovated by adding in-depth analyses of three issue-specific debates. These debates cover issues that are related to our key hypothesis that globalization is restructuring the national political space – immigration, European integration, and economic liberalism. Compared to the previous study, we pay less attention to the demand side of politics, and predominantly focus on the supply side – the election campaigns at both the national and the European level, protest events in the protest arena, and the contents of the public debates among the political elites in the period 2004–06.

Introduction

National elections, which were explored in Chapter 4, remain the most important arena for the mobilization of conflict in contemporary European societies. As part of the political aspect of globalization, however, European citizens increasingly face a complex system of multi-level governance, especially with respect to European integration, so we have incorporated elections to the European Parliament (EP) into our analysis. The question we seek an answer to in this chapter is whether these elections resemble national contests or whether they correspond to forms of Europeanization. These two different characteristics directly refer to the discussion in Chapter 1 where various forms of transnational mobilization were identified (see Table 1.1).

The nation state remains the fundamental guarantor of democracy and freedom in the twenty-first century (Cerny 1999; Dahl 2000) but for citizens in EU member states, EP elections are the most important form of institutionalized political participation beyond it. EP elections were first held in 1979, at a time when this institution played an insignificant role in what was then the European Community. Since then, these elections have become increasingly important, as the EP itself has been given increasing power (Rittberger 2005). Because the Treaty of Lisbon finally came into force on 1 December 2009, the EP could become even more important as the co-decision procedure, which gives it equal power to the council, is now the standard method of legislation in the EU (Hofmann and Wessels 2008: 12).