This week in SPARC we will have Ruth Dassonneville, from U. Montreal/ visiting fellow at EUI, who will present the following paper:

"Restructuring European Party Systems through the Lens of Party Electorates"*

Abstract 

A large and growing body of research draws attention to the rising salience of sociocultural and identitarian issues and, potentially, the emergence of a new political cleavage that divides voters on those issues. However, the micro foundations of this transformation are less well understood. Here we take a voter-perspective to evaluate how party competition has been restructured in the eyes of the voter. We leverage measures of citizens’ self-reported probabilities to vote for alternative political parties in the European Election Study voter surveys two decades apart, 1999 and 2019, to map the electoral affinity and opposition between different party families. We estimate to what extent spatial location on the economic left-right dimension and the GAL/TAN dimension explains the patterns that emerge, and how this has changed over time. Our results provide evidence of (a) spatial location structuring voters’ assessment of other parties, (b) a substantial shift in voter assessment from party competition structured along the economic left-right dimension to competition structured along the GAL/TAN dimension, (c) separation of radical right parties from other parties, with the greatest antipathy between the radical right and greens.

The zoom link can be found here:

https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/85495015202

This will be on Thursday, 2nd June, 14h30-16h00, Sala 1, and also hybrid. Ruth will be on zoom.