Cleavages, Institutions and Competition: Understanding Vote Nationalisation in Western Europe (1965-2015) - Hardcover

Emanuele, Vincenzo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786606739 ISBN 13: 9781786606730

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publ, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Examines the process of vote (de-)nationalization in Western Europe and looks for its main determinants.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vincenzo Emanuele is Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science and Adjunct Professor of Italian Political System at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome.

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Cleavages, Institutions and Competition

Understanding Vote Nationalisation in Western Europe (1965-2015)

By Vincenzo Emanuele

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2018 Vincenzo Emanuele
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-673-0

Contents

List of Figures and Tables, ix, 
List of Abbreviations, xvii, 
Preface, xix, 
Acknowledgements, xxiii, 
PART I: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK, 1, 
1 Theoretical background, 3, 
2 Research design, 21, 
PART II: ASSESSING VOTE NATIONALISATION, 39, 
3 Vote nationalisation trends (1965-2015), 41, 
PART III: EXPLAINING VOTE NATIONALISATION, 59, 
4 The 'macro-sociological' determinants, 61, 
5 The institutional constraints, 75, 
6 The competition factors, 99, 
7 Towards an explanation, 127, 
8 Vote (de)nationalisation in Western Europe: Main findings and implications, 149, 
Appendix: Vote nationalisation trends (1965-2015): National variations, 157, 
Notes, 227, 
References, 249, 
Index, 267, 
About the Author, 275, 

CHAPTER 1

Theoretical background

The task of this chapter is to outline the theoretical framework of this work. It constitutes the indispensable starting point for the empirical analysis to be carried out in the second and in the third part of the book. In the following pages, I review the basic elements of the theory concerning the nationalisation of politics as it has been studied and problematised over the past fifty years.

What is vote nationalisation? How have scholars studied it? Is it just a conceptual definition or is it also a historical process? And, if it is also a historical process, when did it happen? Which were the factors that generated it?

These questions are only some of the issues that are addressed in this chapter. Moreover, this chapter does not exclusively deal with the theoretical aspects of the current research, since it is also devoted to underline the main limits of previous studies on the topic that this book tries to overcome and solve.

The structure of the chapter is as follows: the first section, 'A multidimensional concept', briefly presents the different conceptualisations used in the literature to define this phenomenon and gives account of the main debated points among scholars; finally, it provides a theoretical clarification of what vote nationalisation means. The second section, 'The historical process of nationalisation in Western Europe', analyses, by adopting a macro-sociological approach, the historical process of nationalisation in the specific context of Western Europe, which is the spatial context covered by the research. The third section, 'Historical sources of deviations: Parties for religious, territorial and agrarian defence', explores the most relevant deviations, which have differentiated the territorial configuration of national party systems, thus determining a partial or total failure of the nationalisation process. Finally, the fourth section, 'Limits of previous studies', lists and briefly reviews the previous empirical research on the topic.

A MULTIDIMENSIONAL CONCEPT

Generally defined as 'the uniformity or universality of attitudes and political behaviour within nations' (Caramani 1996: 206), and strictly related to the process of homogenisation of political characters, the term 'nationalisation' assumes a polyhedral physiognomy, characterised by numerous viewpoints and perspectives, and it has been conceptualised in different ways by the scholars who have dealt with the topic. As Morgenstern and Pothoff emphasise, the concept of nationalisation has 'suffered from a conflation of terms and imprecise, if not ambiguous, definitions' (2005: 18).

The theory of the nationalisation of politics first developed in the American setting and originated from Schattschneider's (1960) analysis on the genesis of the US party system, where the term 'nationalization of politics' can be originally found.

Analysing the US party system, where, for more than thirty years (from 1896 to 1932), national political life was dominated by the Republican Party, Schattschneider notes that the electoral support for the two major parties was characterised by strong territoriality, with the Democratic Party dominating the southern states but not able to compete with the Republican Party in the rest of country, so much that in 1896, there was a real competition between the two parties in only six states, thus creating uncertainty about the final result, while in all the other states the apparent supremacy of either the Democratic or the Republican Party did not allow for competitive spaces. This situation radically changed in 1932, when the high degree of territoriality of American politics dissipated because, since that moment, it has been dominated by national rather than local questions: the Depression and the New Deal first, and later World War II and the Cold War, shifted the attention of voters towards national issues. Therefore, according to Schattschneider, nationalisation of politics consists of the turn from local ('sectional' in the author's words) to national politics, and it is meant as an increased competitiveness of elections, with the main national parties contesting elections in each state.

As underlined by Caramani (1996: 207–8), from Schattschneider's reflections it derives that nationalisation is composed of three different elements: a dynamic element (nationalisation as an historical-temporal process), a social element (nationalisation as a structural and cultural change) and a spatial element (nationalisation as an increasing similarity between geographical areas and territorial-administrative units within nations).

Later on, other authors deal with the theme of nationalisation of politics. Stokes (1965; 1967), like Schattschneider, regards the phenomenon as the progressive increase in the importance of national issues and empirically tests his hypotheses by analysing turnout rates and party votes in the United States and Great Britain. Moreover, he introduces a further dimension to operationalise the concept of nationalisation, that is, the correspondence of the change (in turnout levels and votes for a given party) from one election to the next one between the national level and a given number of constituencies. Thus, the higher the number of territorial units that show a change against the national trend (i.e., a party loses votes at national level but grows in many local constituencies), the lower the level of nationalisation.

An instrumental study on this topic is the systematic clarification provided by Claggett, Flanigan and Zingale (1984). Moving from the discussion of Schattschneider's and Stokes's contributions, the authors distinguish three different and coexisting aspects of the concept of nationalisation. First, it is a process of convergence in the levels of partisan support, namely of progressive homogenisation of turnout and support for political parties. Second, the concept of nationalisation expresses the propensity of the electorate to refer to political forces, issues and leaders located at the national level, rather than at the local one: it concerns the tendency of voters to be influenced by national political stimuli as, for example, national political leaders rather than local candidates. Third, nationalisation means a uniform response of voters to these stimuli coming from the national level: the response (operationalised as the swing between two subsequent elections) could be uniform or nonuniform....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publ
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1786606739
• ISBN 13: 9781786606730
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 302
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar