From Two Dimensions to 'Pizza Slices': Remodeling the European Political Space

Elections in many European countries have become less predictable as party systems fragment and new parties challenge the established ones on a range of issues. Emerging political conflict lines have led to unprecedented coalition patterns and even government instabilities. Furthermore, the multi‐level democracy of the European Union presents a challenge in itself. While fifty years of studying voting behavior has taught us much about voters’ partisan preferences, these recent electoral "surprises" hint that our models might be both limited and outdated. It's obvious that elections can no longer be examined from a single perspective, be it voters, media, or candidates. There is also a risk that political parties and political entrepreneurs recognize exploitable social divisions much better than us as political scientists. The crucial challenge then is to develop more nuanced models to fully capture the dynamic permutations of issue space and fluid issue combinations in electoral campaigns, voters' preferences and media coverage. To understand in depth how citizens, elites, parliaments, governments and media interact and relate to each other in the democratic process, this section encourages new approaches and new models to tackle the electoral dynamics in current European democracies. Approaches and models that take advantage of linking data on different actors, such as voters, parties, media and the like, are particularly welcome. The questions to be addressed may include the following: How to construct models that are sufficiently dynamic across time? How to detect how parties, voters and media perceive the relationship between different issues? How to overcome the difficulties of estimating the interaction effects of multiple issue dimensions in standard regression models, especially when more than two issue dimensions exist? The section is organized in co-operation with Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem) and the ECPR Standing Group on Public Opinion and Voting Behavior in a Comparative Perspective. The list of panels: panel I The interplay between voters and parties in party system polarization and fragmentation (chair: Maria Oskarson) panel II Who represent disadvantaged voters and how? (chair: Hanna Wass) panel III Support for populist parties in the context of failures of representation by established parties (chair: Mark Franklin) panel IV Euroscepticism in context (chair: Alexia Katsanidou) panel V The impact of political context on voters’ behavior (Miroslav Nemčok) panel VI Emerging economic risks and new social policies? Public opinion and political behavior in mature welfare states (chair: Zhen Im) panels VII-VIII will be composed of individual paper submissions