09:30 - 11:10
P1
Room: South Hall 2B
Panel Session 1
Davide Vittori, Davide Angelucci, Romain Lachat - Involved no more? Unequal political participation patterns in Europe since 1948
Werner Krause - What are the consequences of including confidence intervals in public opinion polls? Evidence from a survey experiment
Morgan Le Corre Juratic - Dimensions of Conflict, Party Polarization and Turnout in European Multiparty Systems
 
Dimensions of Conflict, Party Polarization and Turnout in European Multiparty Systems
P1-03
Presented by: Morgan Le Corre Juratic
Morgan Le Corre Juratic
European University Institute
Does the rise of party polarization in European multiparty systems lead to electoral mobilization? There is a consensus among scholars that party polarization has increased in European democracies since the mid-1990s. This new and broader political offer should increase the clarity of political alternatives and the stakes of elections for voters. Nevertheless, contradictory to some implications of the spatial competition theory of voting, electoral participation has been decreasing since the end of the 1980s. This paper argues that an important feature of European multiparty systems has not been taken into account thus far when analyzing the effect of party polarization on electoral mobilization, which could explain the inconsistent findings in the literature. Namely, European multi-party systems are characterized by a bi-dimensional structure of party competition divided in economic and cultural issues where parties have not polarized equally. In addition, this paper further argues that the effect of party polarization on electoral mobilization should be conditional upon the individual salience of each these issue dimensions for citizens. Exploiting the variation of party polarization in each of these dimensions across countries between 2002 and 2018 using Chapel Hill Expert Survey and ESS data, this paper explores whether party polarization on economic or cultural issues lead to electoral mobilization.