1.1 Introduction
Traditional explanations for why voters prefer the party they vote for have been found in socio-structural variables such as social class, religion, urban–rural residence and region. These are the structural variables that are included in the famous Lipset–Rokkan model for party cleavages in industrial societies. During recent decades, there have been major changes in social structure and also how social structure determines people’s voting behaviour.
Political issues and value orientations are considered to be more important for individual voter’s preferences in advanced industrial societies. This has partly been explained by the decline of social cleavages and partly by the fact that voters have become more politically sophisticated or cognitively mobilised.
There have also been shifts in the political preferences of the mass publics in value orientations, for example, from religious to secular values and from more authoritarian to libertarian values. It has been hypothesised that value orientations and political issues have become more important determinants of party choice and also that values and issues have become important intervening variables between social structure and party preferences. The impact of socio-structural variable could increasingly be an indirect effect via value orientations.
The current work is a comparative study of 18 West European countries with data from 2008–2010. The main research problems are:
- 1.How do (a) social structure and (b) value orientations influence party choice in advanced industrial democracies?
- 2.To what extent is the impact of social structure transmitted via value orientations?
- 3.To what extent is the impact of value orientations on party choice a causal effect when controlling for prior structural variables?
Research problems 1b and 1b are examined in detail in Chapters 4 and 5 where they are devoted more space than the two other research problems. The reason for this is that the nature of the topics requires considerable space. The more concrete research questions that are addressed are: a) the comparative strength of the correlations with party choice, and b) the location of the parties grouped into party families on the structural variables and the value orientations. In particular, the second topic requires much space for a comparative analysis of 18 countries. The two other research questions are examined in a single chapter (Chapter 6) where three types of voting are differentiated. Two of these reflect the types relevant to these research questions.
This chapter is organised as follows.
First, in Section 1.2, the notions of stable alignment, dealignment and realignment are discussed on the basis of relevant literature. Preference formations and party choice in advanced industrial societies are then reviewed on the basis of the important works of Ronald Inglehart and Herbert Kitschelt (Section 1.3). Section 1.4 outlines the notions cognitive mobilisation and political sophistication and how these might be expected to be relevant for the research problems in this work. Section 1.5 outlines some details regarding the theoretical framework concerning the main variables in this work: social structure, value orientations and party choice. Section 1.6 discusses the explanatory macro-level variables that are used to explain the empirical patterns. Section 1.7 discusses methodological and statistical considerations, first and foremost related to the fact that the dependent variable – party choice – is a nominal-level variable that might be difficult to analyse in a cross-national context, while Section 1.8 outlines the organisation of the book.
1.2 Stable Alignment, Dealignment and Realignment
Since the 1970s there has been considerable change in the electoral behaviour of voters. Rather than stable alignment, researchers began talking about dealignment and realignment. One important perspective in Lipset and Rokkan’s well-known work (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) was the persistent impact of social structure on party choice, which they called the “freezing of party alignments”. This stable alignment was – according to the authors – caused by the persistent impact of the socio-structural variables that they focused upon in their seminal essay – and party choice.
Later research has documented considerable decline in the impact of at least some of the structural variables that they considered important. In the literature there has been a focus on “defreezing” of party alignments, structural or secular dealignment (Dalton et al. 1984) and the decline of cleavage politics (Franklin et al. 1992). There has also been discussion of possible realignments associated with the advanced industrial societies or post-industrial societies. These concepts have also been used in important and more recent contributions focusing on post-industrial dealignment and realignment perspectives (Kitschelt and Rehm 2015).
The discussion of changes in social cleavages is then frequently discussed using the terms dealignment and realignment (Dalton et al. 1984). Here dealignment and realignment will be discussed within the framework of the impact of socio-structural variables and value orientations.
Dealignment means first and foremost that the impact of the structural variables has become smaller. Voters do not vote according to their location in the social structure to the same degree as previously, and issues and values do not have large explanatory power and/or do not contribute to stable support for the various parties. The increased instability in the party system is frequently associated with and considered to be caused by dealignment. The functional model which Dalton et al. (1984) associated with the dealignment process indicated a decline of the social and political roles of the political parties and a decline of the role of party identification. Kitschelt and Rehm (2015: 183) associate the post-industrial dealignment perspective with an occupational diversification that makes the organisation of collective interests increasingly difficult, accelerated social mobility and breakdowns of stable social networks, neighbourhoods and social “milieus”. As to perspectives related to voting, dealignment is coupled to the increased importance of voting on the basis of perceived competence of parties and politicians and issue ownership, and not so much with voting on the basis of position issues.
Realignment implies the eclipse of old cleavages and the rise of new ones. There is first a dealignment from the old cleavages and then a new alignment related to the new cleavage structure. While Lipset and Rokkan focused on the national and the industrial revolutions, Dalton et al. (1984: 455–456) couple the realignment perspective to a social cleavage model that incorporated a third post-industrial revolution which might create a new basis of social cleavages.
There are several kinds of cleavages and conflict lines that have been focused in the literature on realignment: New structural cleavages and value-based conflict lines have to a larger degree than in typical industrial society – according to some researchers – become more important. As to structural cleavages, we might differentiate between new structural cleavages and transformation of the impact of the traditional structural variables on party choice.1
Gender and new “horizontal” structural divisions within the new middle class are examples of such new structural divisions.2 These horizontal divisions might be public versus private sector location (Knutsen 2001, 2005) or various work logics according to a competing framework (Oesch 2006a, 2006b).
Gender is a borderline case between this category and the next because previously (and partly at present) there was a traditional gender gap where women voted more frequently for Christian and Conservative parties, while they increasingly vote for leftist parties more frequently than men.
In addition to gender, the most pronounced example of transformation of social cleavage variables is possibly related to education and social class. Increasingly, the higher educated strata and the new middle class vote for leftist parties, in particular New Leftist parties, while part of the working class votes for the rightist parties, in particular the New Rightist parties. Values and issues related to New Politics are frequently stated as the main explanations for this changing relationship between important class variables and party choice (Kitschelt 1994, 1995; Knutsen 2006a: 4–5).
The impact of issues and value orientations has been shown to be increasing. That which is most frequently focussed upon in the literature is the rise of issue voting, but there are also important perspectives based on New Politics literature related to the increased importance of political value voting. These perspectives are quite similar since – to a large degree – they are both based on approaches with multidimensional policy spaces that reflect issues or values.
This increased impact of issues and values is considered to be a causal effect when prior structural variables are controlled for and is first and foremost associated with the so-called cultural or New Politics dimension(s). However, more general perspectives have also been formulated where Old Politics values have become more important compared with the equivalent socio-structural variables. This is discussed later.
Most of the literature associates the eventual increased impact of issues and values on party choice with the New Politics orientations (Inglehart 1984, 1997: Chapter 8; Dalton et al. 1984). However, many of the arguments imply that all types of issues and values – both Old and New Politics – might increase since they are based on structural factors such as increased level of education and political knowledge, and increased exposure to the mass media. There might then be an increase in the impact of all value orientations (Borre 2001: 134–136). Old Politics values were in typical industrial societies strongly anchored in social structure, and therefore, the causal impact of these values on party choice was small, but in advanced industrial societies this has changed and Old Politics values are not so strongly anchored in social structural variables, but have significant causal impact on party choice (Knutsen 1988).
Another type of realignment is one which follows from the changes in social structure. Ecological realignment implies that changes in party support follow directly from the changes in social structure. Ecological realignment contributes not only to change the support of the various parties but also to change political agenda and party strategies. Parties try to appeal to some of the new expanding social groups.
For Kitschelt and Rehm (2015: 180–182) the post-industrial realignment perspective implies that parties act strategically and realign with the evolving preference distribution in the population induced by changing occupational and socio-demographic group sizes. Given the high level of cognitive mobilisation and sophistication of many post-industrial voters who can discriminate between the programmatic positions of the parties and the multidimensionality of the space on salient competitive issue dimensions, party systems tend to fragment through programmatic diversification. Post-industrial party systems are, therefore, highly fragmented if the electoral system allows this, and voters gravitate to parties with positions and appeals that are closest to the voter’s preferences in a multidimensional space. The post-industrial realignment perspective may then generate cross-nationally quite distinct party system configuration and multidimensional space.
1.3 Preference Formation and Party Choice in Advanced Industrial Societies
The impact of issues, values and “ideology” are important factors for explaining voter’s party choice. Given that the impact of social structure has declined and given than there has been large changes in the social structure, some authors have argued that the impact of issues and ...