Electoral behavior and party competition: continuity and change in Western Europe

Dozent/in	PhD Álvaro Canalejo-Molero
Veranstaltungsart	Masterseminar
Code	FS231331
Semester	Frühjahrssemester 2023
Durchführender Fachbereich	Politikwissenschaft
Studienstufe	Bachelor Master
Termin/e	Mi, 22.02.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 01.03.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 08.03.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 15.03.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 22.03.2023, 14:00 - 17:30 Uhr, 3.A05 Mi, 05.04.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 19.04.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 26.04.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 03.05.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 10.05.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 17.05.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 24.05.2023, 14:15 - 16:00 Uhr, HS 12 Mi, 31.05.2023, 14:15 - 17:45 Uhr, 4.B54
Umfang	2 Semesterwochenstunden
Turnus	wöchentlich
Inhalt	Elections in Europe have become increasingly unpredictable in the last decades. The political parties that traditionally alternated in government have suffered substantial losses in favour of new parties that often benefit from radical and populist demands. The electorate is more volatile, and the traditional linkages between parties and civil organizations have decayed. As a consequence, governments are more unstable as well. In Germany, for example, the government negotiations escalated from one month in 2013 to almost six months after the entry of the radical party AfD in 2017. In other European countries, such as Spain or the Netherlands, the number of parliamentary parties has doubled in the last twenty years, while the Italian party system has arguably collapsed twice in the same period. How has this situation come about? These changes are not random but driven by societal transformations and the strategies of new political actors, like social movements and challenger parties. In addition, they have not affected all of Europe equally but depend on factors that vary across countries and over time. This seminar will review the different 'transformation waves' that have shaped Western European party systems from the 1960s until now. It will then try to make sense of these changes by exploring the most relevant (electoral) demand and supply factors discussed in the scholarly literature. The goal is to provide students with the conceptual and empirical tools necessary to analyze the behaviour of voters and parties by following the evolution of Western European party systems from a comparative perspective.
Lernziele	By the end of this course, students will be able to: - Identify the main theories of party system formation and change in Western Europe - Critically assess the appropriateness of different theories to specific European regions and historical contexts - Apply these theories to analyse different cases from a comparative and historical perspective - Trace the logical continuity of the development of modern cleavage theory - Identify the main European political party families and their historical correlates - Understand the concept of electoral volatility and interpret analyses using its most common empirical indicators - Think of elections as electoral markets in which demand and supply factors interact to produce electoral outcomes (i.e., seats and govt. coalitions) - Read scientific articles with a critical perspective and present critical written responses - Work in collaboration with others - Orally present their work to a broad audience
Voraussetzungen	Master or advanced bachelor students
Sprache	Englisch
Leistungsnachweis	Oral presentation in class; response papers
Abschlussform / Credits	Regular attendance, short in-class presentation, two short response papers (graded) / 4 Credits
Hinweise	To get the credits, students should: • Attend at least 80% of the classes • Do the mandatory readings (one per session) • Write two short response papers (300-500 words) • Prepare and run a presentation (individual or in groups of two depending on the number of students)
Hörer-/innen	Nach Vereinbarung
Kontakt	alvaro.canalejo@unilu.ch
Material	Individual laptop
Literatur	This list should be taken as orientative, since it might suffer changes before the beginning of the course: · Mandatory readings Boix, C. (2007). The emergence of parties and party systems. In The Oxford handbook of comparative politics. Bornschier, S. (2010). The new cultural divide and the two-dimensional political space in Western Europe. West European Politics, 33(3), 419–444. Chiaramonte, A., & Emanuele, V. (2017). Party system volatility, regeneration and de-institutionalization in Western Europe (1945–2015). Party Politics, 23(4), 376–388. Hobolt, S. B., & De Vries, C. E. (2012). When dimensions collide: The electoral success of issue entrepreneurs. European Union Politics, 13(2), 246–268. Ignazi, P. (1992). The silent counter-revolution: Hypotheses on the emergence of extreme right-wing parties in Europe. European Journal of Political Research, 22(1), 3–34. Kriesi, H., & Hutter, S. (2019). Economic and political crises–the context of critical elections. European Party Politics in Times of Crisis, 33. Mair, P. (1993). Myths of electoral change and the survival of traditional parties: The 1992 Stein Rokkan Lecture. European Journal of Political Research, 24(2), 121–133. Müller-Rommel, F. (1998). Explaining the electoral success of green parties: A cross-national analysis. Environmental Politics, 7(4), 145–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644019808414428 Oesch, D. (2008). Explaining workers’ support for right-wing populist parties in Western Europe: Evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland. International Political Science Review, 29(3), 349–373. · Additional readings Cavaille, C., & Marshall, J. (2019). Education and anti-immigration attitudes: Evidence from compulsory schooling reforms across Western Europe. American Political Science Review, 113(1), 254–263. Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. Emanuele, V., & Chiaramonte, A. (2018). A growing impact of new parties: Myth or reality? Party system innovation in Western Europe after 1945. Party Politics, 24(5), 475–487. Emanuele, V., & Chiaramonte, A. (2019). Explaining the impact of new parties in the Western European party systems. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 29(4), 490–510. Hernández, E., & Kriesi, H. (2016). The electoral consequences of the financial and economic crisis in Europe. European Journal of Political Research, 55(2), 203–224. Hernández, E., & Kriesi, H. (2016). The electoral consequences of the financial and economic crisis in Europe. European Journal of Political Research, 55(2), 203–224. Hobolt, S. B., & De Vries, C. E. (2015). Issue entrepreneurship and multiparty competition. Comparative Political Studies, 48(9), 1159–1185. Hobolt, S. B., & Tilley, J. (2016). Fleeing the centre: the rise of challenger parties in the aftermath of the euro crisis. West European Politics, 39(5), 971–991. Hooghe, L., & Marks, G. (2018). Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the transnational cleavage. Journal of European Public Policy, 25(1), 109–135. Hutter, S., Kriesi, H., & Vidal, G. (2018). Old versus new politics: The political spaces in Southern Europe in times of crises. Party Politics, 24(1), 10–22. Inglehart, R. (1977). The silent revolution: Changing values and political styles in advanced industrial society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kalyvas, S. N. (2018). The rise of Christian democracy in Europe. Cornell University Press. Kriesi, H. (1998). The transformation of cleavage politics The 1997 Stein Rokkan lecture. European Journal of Political Research, 33(2), 165–185. Kriesi, H., Grande, E., Lachat, R., Dolezal, M., Bornschier, S., & Frey, T. (2006). Globalization and the transformation of the national political space: Six European countries compared. European Journal of Political Research, 45(6), 921–956. Lipset, S. M., & Rokkan, S. (1967). Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments: an introduction. Free Press. Mudde, C. (1999). The single-issue party thesis: Extreme right parties and the immigration issue. West European Politics, 22(3), 182–197. Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe (Vol. 22, Issue 8). Cambridge University Press Cambridge. Muller-Rommel, F. (2019). New politics in Western Europe: The rise and success of green parties and alternative lists. Routledge. Oesch, D., & Rennwald, L. (2018). Electoral competition in Europe’s new tripolar political space: Class voting for the left, centre-right and radical right. European Journal of Political Research, 57(4), 783–807. Przeworski, A. (1986). Paper stones: A history of electoral socialism. University of Chicago Press. Rooduijn, M., & Burgoon, B. (2018). The paradox of well-being: do unfavorable socioeconomic and sociocultural contexts deepen or dampen radical left and right voting among the less well-off? Comparative Political Studies, 51(13), 1720–1753. Spoon, J.-J., & Klüver, H. (2019). Party convergence and vote switching: Explaining mainstream party decline across Europe. European Journal of Political Research, 0(0). https://doi.org/doi:10.1111/1475-6765.12331