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Family meetings: Ideological convergence within party families across Europe, 1945–2009

Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This article looks at ideological convergence within party families in 30 European countries. Its goal is to assess the degree of left–right convergence over time between national political parties and their electorates within the same family. The analysis concentrates on seven major party families, and within-family convergence is used to assess the degree to which functional oppositions prevail over territorial ones as an indicator of Europeanisation. Ideological convergence is measured through quantitative indicators on the left–right axis at two levels. First, at the elite level the article measures within-family convergence since 1945 with manifesto data. Second, at the electorate level the article measures convergence of voters of a same family since 1970 with survey data. Economic and cultural left–right dimensions are distinguished. Results attest to high and persistent long-term ideological cohesiveness at both elite and electorate level (especially on the economic left–right dimension) pointing to a Europeanised party system.

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Notes

  1. The integration of system-wide electorates and party systems are an important element of the structuring of party politics (Bartolini, 2005) and of the emergence of a ‘truly European’ party system (Andeweg, 1995). On this discussion see also Beetham and Lord (1998), Schmitter (2000), Hix (2002) and Caramani (2006).

  2. A major symposium on the comparison of measures of party positioning and policy preferences has been published in a special issue of Electoral Studies in 2007 (volume 26, issue 1, pp. 1–234). This represents the most important attempt to ‘triangulate’ between expert surveys, party manifestos and survey data with a first part of the volume devoted to the issue of European integration and a second party devoted to the left–right dimension. See Marks (2007).

  3. Party families are referred to in the classical literature since Duverger (1954, pp. 17–27). The categorisation of parties according to families is evident also in Rokkan (1999). For more recent contributions relying on family classifications see Mair and Mudde (1998), Volkens and Klingemann (2002), Thomas (2006), Kriesi et al (2008), Bornschier (2010) and Ennser (2010). For an analysis of the literature on parties classified by family see Caramani and Hug (1998).

  4. The convergence between families is what several spatial analyses on centripetal competition since Downs (1957) have described. After the classic Budge et al (1987) more recent research includes Stonecash et al (2003), Grofman (2004), Adams et al (2004) and Hale (2008).

  5. For this reason the CMP includes this dimension since 1945. On the contrary, the dimension of opposition or support for European integration is included only since 1990 (see Pennings (2006) and Gabel and Hix (2002) for positions on Europe related to family). Furthermore, as Budge et al (2001) have argued, the left–right dimension captures the basic cleavages of industrialised societies. Castles et al (1997) offer a comparison of left–right scales (see also Mair, 2007) whereas Knutsen (1995) presents a comparative study. Most of the literature points to the lack of convergence among party families. Volkens and Klingemann (2002) have found that families vary significantly in their left–right placement. Thomas (2006), using a 10-point left–right scale, finds support for a narrowing of parties’ scope but data did not highlight convergence among party families. On the left–right dimension and party positions see also Dinas and Gemenis (2010), Hug and Schulz (2007) and Albright (2010).

  6. Harmel et al (2007) analyse Euromanifestos (of European party federations) since 1979 and conclude that instances of divergence are outnumbered by those of convergence. On Europarties see also Johansson and Zervakis (2002).

  7. We opted for text data instead of expert surveys because they allow broader comparison and longer time series. Among major expert survey projects see Benoit, Hunt and Laver (Laver and Hunt, 1992; Benoit and Laver, 2006; Mikhaylov et al, 2008) and the Chapel Hill projects (Ray, 1999; Marks et al, 2006; Steenbergen and Marks, 2007). On expert surveys see also Castles and Mair (1984), Huber and Inglehart (1995) and Knutsen (1998). For a comparison between expert surveys and content-base data see Benoit and Laver (2007).

  8. The EB include three variables: closeness to a party (feelclo), prospective vote intention (voteint) and inclination to vote (inclvote). The ESS includes two variables: retrospective vote intention (questions B14 then B12 since 2004, variable prtvt) and closeness to a party (questions B25b then B20b since 2004, variable prtcl). Both sources provide information on party membership, which we did not consider. Using vote intention does not reveal differences with respect to closeness to a party.

  9. A related issue concerns response rates. We excluded parties with response rates on vote intention and feeling of closeness below 50 respondents. In most cases the N of respondents for parties is above 100. This reduces risks of biased estimates of the position of electorates.

  10. Concerning the position of parties on the left–right axis, in case of alliance ESS gives closeness and vote intention for all parties in the alliance, but we have used the ESS position of the largest party in the alliance. The EB and ESS wording in the questionnaire about self-placement (variable lrs) are similar (questions B28 then B23 since 2004, variable lrscale).

  11. Below we distinguish between a cultural and an economic dimension of left–right. We chose not to use the alternative scale suggested by Lowe et al (2011) based on the logarithm of odds-ratios.

  12. As far as ESS data are concerned, these surveys are available every two years. This means that sometimes we have not used all the information available as elections do not take place that often.

  13. The classification of parties into families is based on the definition parties give themselves of their position as expressed in their programmes and on their websites. Problematic single cases are discussed in the text. This classification has been cross-checked with other classifications such as those from the CMP (Budge et al, 2001; Klingemann et al, 2006, but also Zuckerman et al, 2007) and available data from expert surveys (see references in footnote 7 above). The CMP and expert surveys do not classify all parties but only major ones.

  14. For an analysis of the ‘presence’ of party families across European countries and of the homogeneity of their electoral support see Caramani (2011). To establish which party families exist in at least half of the 30 European countries we have considered the latest decade rather than the average of presence for the entire period since 1945. One related issue is that party ideologies change over time, namely, in processes of de-radicalisation as well as ideological change more generally. To be able to draw a picture of the European party systems at specific points in time, each party has been given a code (party family) at each election. Even in case of change of ideology the party code is left unchanged to allow for longitudinal analysis.

  15. Details appear in Appendix A. Mainly because regionalist and ethnic parties exist in few countries, a ‘minority parties’ family has mostly been excluded from the analysis. Similarly, because of sporadic presence in elections – both spatially and temporally – also agrarians and social liberals have not been considered in detail.

  16. The graphs include both Western and Eastern European countries. Omitting East European parties does not alter the general trend of Figure 1. The figure, in addition to the seven party families considered, shows also trends for agrarians, minority parties and social liberals.

  17. Orthodox parties have been omitted from the graph (since such parties have contested only two elections in Greece).

  18. In this graph one sees again that electorates are more radical than parties in their ideology. The erratic movement displayed by inter-confessionals in 1955–1959 is limited to the only party included in this category in that period, which is the German Christian-Democratic Union.

  19. An important additional information included in Table 3 is the number of cases: (1) the number of countries in which at least one party of a given family exists; (2) the number of observations, that is, parties for countries in which more than one party per family exists. The number of countries varies during the period considered due to new data and accession to the European Union (and the consequent inclusion in the EB). Values in Table 3 represent overall averages for the period 1945–2004. As before, the latest period from 2005 to 2009 has been excluded from the computation because data for eight countries only are available.

  20. A negative value of discrepancy means that electorates are more left than what appears through manifestos. A positive value means that electorates are more right than the party.

  21. In the upper graph far right parties in the 1950s have a value close to zero because it includes two parties only, namely, the Italian Social Movement and the Austrian FPÖ until the 1980s.

  22. For the rank-order from left to right for the various national parties see the legend that follows the lines in the graphs. For both graphs the time period differs between some countries as documented in Table 1 owing to democratisation processes, but also data availability. In Figure 4 Bulgaria, Cyprus and Iceland have been excluded because there is only one time point in the ESS and no one in the EB. In Figure 5 Cyprus and Malta have been excluded because of short time series.

  23. Figure 6 includes selected years only and the period 2005–2009 has been excluded because there are only eight countries in the CMP online update for this period of time.

  24. At the electorate level Bulgaria, Cyprus and Iceland have been excluded because of a short time period. At the party level Cyprus and Malta have been omitted for the same reason. In Figure 7 the period 2005–2009 has been skipped because of too few countries.

  25. Because of too few observations Bulgaria, Cyprus, Iceland, Poland and Slovakia have been excluded at the electorate level. For the Austrian Liberales Forum, classified as liberal, data are available for 1995–1999 only and therefore it does not appear here (the FPÖ has been classified as far right). Again because of insufficient observations on party manifestos Austria, Cyprus, Greece, Iceland, Ireland and Latvia have been left out.

  26. The correspondence between the party and electoral level is supported by the correlation between the 1–10 left–right position of parties’ electorates and the position of parties based on their manifestos that is generally high with a Pearson's r=0.603, whether electorates are considered based on feeling of closeness or voting intention.

  27. Unlike other research (including the Comparative Manifesto Project) we decided to include ‘welfare’ in the economic dimension rather than the cultural one (see the variable ‘per504’ in the CMP data set that is used in that study as a cultural variable).

  28. The CMP data places parties on the left–right scale by counting the number of either positive or negative mentions (‘quasi-sentences’) for 56 items from which various scales, including the left–right one, are then derived.

  29. See, for a similar procedure, Benoit and Laver (2006, p. 100) who however use slightly different categories.

  30. As mentioned above we did not follow the suggestion offered in Lowe et al (2011) to modify the original CMP items. The original items based on the number of quasi-sentences include positive mentions and, therefore, are not subject to criticism that what is actually measured is the salience of an issue (whether or not it is important) rather than the left-right position of the party on this issue (whether it is positive or negative).

  31. In the graph positions represent averages for the entire period since 1945. For specific periods party families would be positioned slightly differently as in the case of far right parties that in the more recent decade are placed at the left of the reference line for the economic axis (upper left quadrangle). The graph also includes agrarians and social liberals.

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Appendices

Appendix A

Table A1

Table A1 Party families classification

Appendix B

Recodification of the CMP variable

The left–right scale ranging from −100 to +100 has been recoded to match the other scales used in the paper from 1 to 10 where 1 represents far left. We have first increased the value of the variable ‘left_right’ (or ‘rile’) by 100 to obtain a variable ranging from 0 to 200 and then divided this by 2 to obtain a variable ranging from 0 to 100. Further we divided it by 10 to obtain a variable ranging from 0 to 10.

This new variable correlates perfectly (r=1.0) with the original variable. Finally, we recoded all 0 values into 1 (which in the original variable would correspond to values between −100 and −80). Moreover after the recodification the variable correlates perfectly with the original one as there are no values between −100 and −80.

Creation of economic and cultural left–right dimensions

The distinction between economic and cultural dimensions is limited to CMP data while it is not possible for survey data. To create the left–right economic and cultural variables we calculated the number of quasi-sentences in favour of right-wing categories as a percentage of the total number of quasi-sentences in favour of both left- and right-wing categories. The higher the numerator, the more right-wing the party. We then divided the result by 10 to make it vary between 0 and 10.

Finally, we recoded 0 into 1 to make the scale match the other scales used in the article. For a similar procedure see Marks et al (2006). Items for each of the two economic and cultural dimensions for both left and right appear in Table B1.

Table B1 Left-right dimension

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Camia, V., Caramani, D. Family meetings: Ideological convergence within party families across Europe, 1945–2009. Comp Eur Polit 10, 48–85 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2011.1

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