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Partisanship and age effects in recent democracies: Southern Europe from a comparative perspective

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

The formation of partisan identities has been widely studied in advanced democracies, but little is known about the origin and development of partisanship in recent democracies. This article aims to analyze the relationship between age and partisan identities in new democratic regimes by considering the cases of new Southern European countries. In particular, we examine generational, life-cycle and period effects using longitudinal data from 1985 to 2010. Our results show that the position in the age structure has a significant impact on partisanship, while attitudes towards parties displayed by ‘post-democracy’ generations are different from those of previous cohorts. We also find a negative period effect on partisanship, especially in the last decade. The final section discusses these findings and their implications for the evolution of partisan identities in contemporary European democracies.

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Notes

  1. I refer to partisanship or partisan identities as the socio-psychological orientations developed towards political parties. As several authors have noticed (Budge et al, 1976; Holmberg, 2007; Bartle and Bellucci, 2008), this concept is more appropriate than the term party identification for the study of European parties and voters because it can distinguish between partisanship and vote choice. We use the terms partisan identities, partisanship and party attachments interchangeably. For problems of measurement see the third section.

  2. Western European countries are all European democracies included in the Eurobarometer surveys except third-wave regimes (see Table 1).

  3. We use in the text the term ‘party dealignment’ as the general decline of partisan attachments or the weakening of party loyalties (Dalton, 2000, p. 22).

  4. However, one limitation is worth mentioning. We cannot fully analyze the intensity of partisanship because the operationalization in the ESS is slightly different from the Eurobarometer series. Thus, we will use mainly the open question about partisanship (dichotomous variable). It should also be noticed that answers about partisanship are likely to be affected by electoral experiences, especially when the year of the survey corresponds to an election year.

  5. To ease interpretation, we restrict the following analysis to the years of 1985 and 1992 of the Eurobarometer series. The main findings of our analysis are the same even if we consider the complete data series.

  6. This seems to be confirmed at least for the Spanish case (see Barnes et al, 1985). The authors found a flat age curve, supporting the different relationship between age and partisanship hypothesized for a new electorate.

  7. Using the data points from Figure 2 as the dependent variable – that is, the score of partisanship for each cohort – and dummy variables measuring cohort and period effects as independent variables, the results indicate that in Greece age-groups differences are stronger than in the two Iberian countries. While in Western Europe each cohort presents statistically significant differences, in Greece the level of partisanship differ significantly (at the 0.001 level) only for Cohorts 3 and 4 (post 1960). On the other hand, generational effects achieve statistical significance in Spain and Portugal only for the post-consolidation cohort (post 1974). Full results are available on request.

  8. The peak of partisanship registered in 2002 should be probably considered as a period effect due to the fact that legislative elections took place in that year, thus increasing the level of partisan identities. This consideration also applies to the 2004 Spanish elections.

  9. The small differences between cohorts registered in 2008 may be the effect of the mobilization experienced for the legislative elections.

  10. The independent variables are coded as follows: gender (0: woman; 1: man); education (1: primary; 2: secondary; 3: undergraduate or more); ideology (0: no; 1: yes).

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Riccardo Dillon Wanke for his research assistance and three anonymous referees for useful comments.

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  1. Department of Political Studies, Nova University of Lisbon, Av. de Berna, 26-C, Lisbon, 1069-061, Portugal

    Marco Lisi

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Lisi, M. Partisanship and age effects in recent democracies: Southern Europe from a comparative perspective. Comp Eur Polit 13, 493–513 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2014.3

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