Electoral Behavior in New Democracies
Kriesi et al. (2006, 2008) argue that Western European polities have experienced the emergence of new 'political potentials' in the context of globalisation or ‘denationalization’. The beneficiaries ('winners') are expected to identify with parties espousing an 'open' politics of integration; the losers with a 'closed' politics of demarcation. The notion of an 'integration / demarcation' conflict as the basis of new political identities and lines of party competition is also applicable to the context of democratisation in Central and Eastern Europe, since the 'orthodox liberal' paradigm of post-communist modernisation aimed explicitly at integration with the comity of liberal democratic nations. This paper offers a comparative cross-national evaluation of the extent and depth of this putative cleavage through an analysis of the socio-demographic and ideological determinants of voters’ intended party choices in 25 EU member states, using data on party preferences and attitudes of European electorates from the 2009 European Election Study (EES) and party placement data from the 2010 iteration of the Chapel Hill expert survey. It finds that socio-demographic factors are not as important as expected, but that broad ideological identifications have a significant influence on party choice.
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