Transformation of the political space: A citizens’ perspective

Abstract

A large and growing body of research draws attention to the rising salience of socio-cultural 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 between 1999 and 2019 in order to map electoral affinity and opposition among party families. We estimate to what extent spatial location on the economic left–right dimension and the GAL-TAN dimension explain the patterns that emerge, and how this has changed over time. Our results provide evidence of a substantial shift in voter assessment from party competition structured along the economic left–right dimension to competition structured along the GAL-TAN dimension. We also find great separation of TAN parties from other parties, with the deepest antipathy between the TAN parties and greens.