After the Storm: Party Systems and Political Representation in Southern Europe in the Aftermath of the Great Recession

Abstract

Since 2010 there has been an outpouring of publications focusing on the political effects of the Eurozone crisis and of the subsequent policies of extreme austerity in Southern Europe. Many of these studies were conducted during periods characterized by high degrees of volatility and fluidity and, as a result, they were able to capture mere snapshots of the political transformations that occurred in the region in the past seven years. As the region is slowly starting to recover and to put this period of economic turmoil behind (even if somewhat unevenly), the timing is right for a more complete evaluation concerning the political effects of the Great Recession on the politics of Southern Europe. New research can now begin to differentiate between short-term, transient effects from more lasting forms of political transformation that have occurred within the region. The papers in this panel focus on different aspects of continuity and change from a comparative perspective and cover a wide range of research questions. The first of these concerns types and degrees of party system change in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus, with an emphasis on patterns of dealignment and realignment, the emergence of new parties and new dimensions of political competition as well as changing patterns in interparty dynamics and government formation. A second research question relates to the impact of the crisis on the modes and quality of political representation. Using fresh data, the focus will be on qualitative and quantitative change in both descriptive and substantive political representation (with an emphasis on elite-citizen ideological and policy preference congruence). Finally, the panel will also explore changes in the attitudes of citizens in South European polities towards democratic institutions. During the years of the crisis public opinion trends in all countries in Southern Europe pointed towards a steep decline of trust in institutions and satisfaction with democracy. In some countries these indicators have already bounced back (eg. in Portugal) showing that some of those attitudinal changes were rather ephemeral. Using longitudinal data, a question that will be addressed concerns a possible longer-term impact of the period of the crisis on underlying political values, with an eye for detecting possible cohort effects. The panel will allow members of a collaborative network of scholars that has formed under the auspices of the project “Crisis, Political Representation and Democratic Renewal: The Portuguese case in the Southern European Context” to present for the first time their findings using fresh comparative evidence. Specifically, the members of the collaborative network will utilize data from a relatively long line of both mass and elite surveys conducted in the countries of Southern Europe before during and after the crisis (members of the research team from different countries have collaborated in research design and data collection), that will allow them to track both short and longer-term effects of the crisis on political representation and party system change.