European party politics in times of crisis

"Introduction Our key question in this book is how the multiple crises that Europe faced in the aftermath of the Great Recession influenced the intensity and structuration of political conflict in national party systems.In particular,we ask how the cultural integration-demarcation divide that had been shaping up in north-western Europe before the onset of the Great Recession was affected by these multiple crises and whether this divide was 'traveling' to the European south and east. Figure 1.1: Theoretical framework Embedding the economic crisis in a long-term perspective As outlined,we first introduce the three long-term structural factors that we consider to have had a decisive influence on the structuration of party competition in the long run.As shown in Figure 1.1,these are long-term processes of societal change,regime legacies and the ever more important multi-level system of European governance. /or fascist regimes.Only in Italy did the fascist right survive the fall of the regime and was able to organise itself openly.But,paradoxically,the Italian neo-fascists started to decline at the very moment when the radical right began its rise in NWE,precisely because of their solid neo-fascist lineage (Ignazi 2003: 52).Only by distancing themselves from this legacy could they make a fresh start. Third,the relevance of the multi-level structure of the EU polity to national politics is likely to vary not only between member states and non-member states of the EU,but also among member states.During the Great Recession,it was arguably more important for Eurozone members and,among the latter for the debtor states which became the object of supranational crisis management. The structuration of party competition at the onset of the Great Recession".ERC POLCON project funded.-- Figures -- Tables -- Contributors -- Preface and Acknowledgements Part I - Theoretical Framework and Context 1 - Crises and the Transformation of the National Political Space in Europe 2 - Economic and Political Crises: The Context of Critical Elections 3 - The Media Content Analysis and Cross-Validation Part II - Country Studies Southern Europe 4 - Spain – Out with the Old: The Restructuring of Spanish Politics 5 - Greece – Punctuated Equilibrium: The Restructuring of Greek Politics 6 - Italy – The End of Bipolarism: Restructuration in an Unstable Party System 7 - Portugal – A Tale of Apparent Stability and Surreptitious Transformation Central-Eastern Europe 8 - Hungary – A Hungarian Crisis or Just a Crisis in Hungary? 9 - Poland – ‘Modern’ versus ‘Normal’: The Increasing Importance of the Cultural Divide 10 - Romania – Polity Contestation and the Resilience of Mainstream Parties 11 - Latvia – An Ever-Wider Gap: The Ethnic Divide in Latvian Party Politics North-Western Europe 12 - Austria, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland: Old and New Winning Formulas of the Populist Radical Right 13 - The Restructuring of British and German Party Politics in Times of Crisis 14 - Ireland – Limited Restructuration in the Poster Child of Austerity Part III - Conclusions 15 - Diverging Europe: The Political Consequences of the Crises in a Comparative Perspective 16 - Conclusion: A Critical Juncture for the Structuration of Party Systems? -- Bibliography -- Inde