Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to address whether or not the increased salience of the cultural dimension that we observe in Britain is shared elsewhere in Europe. I first look at earlier studies that have been carried out on other European cases, both with regard to patterns of political competition overall and with regard to how recent changes have affected the party system. I then draw on a new source of opinion data, provided by the Voting Advice Application EUvox from across Europe, to identify the most salient political dimensions. I find that the pattern of political competition that we observed in Britain in Chapter 3 is shared by many Northern European countries and find marked similarities between the party systems of Britain, Denmark and France in terms of the positions that party voters occupy in the three countries with respect to the most salient dimensions.
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Notes
- 1.
See https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/country_code_list.htm, accessed 6 August 2018.
- 2.
The indicator is calculated as \({N} = 1/\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {p_{i}^{2} }\), where n is the total number of parties and pi is the proportion of votes or seats as a fraction of the total. If there are two parties with 50% of the vote and/or seats each, its value (unsurprisingly) will be 1/(0.52 + 0.52) = 1/(0.25 + 0.25) = 1/0.5 = 2.
- 3.
Gallagher, Michael, 2018. Election indices dataset at http://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/people/michael_gallagher/ElSystems/index.php, accessed 4 July 2018.
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Wheatley, J. (2019). The European Perspective. In: The Changing Shape of Politics. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03940-0_5
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