Welfare Democracies and Multidimensional Party Competition in Europe

This chapter explains the relationship between the four European worlds of welfare democracies (Nordic, continental, southern, and Anglo-Saxon) and multidimensional party competition. It systematically examines the variation of the relationship between party positions and salience on economic and cultural politics. The expectation is that southern political economies facilitate closer association between economic and cultural issues, whereas Nordic welfare states produce party systems where competition between mainstream parties is defined by economic politics. The continental political economies stand between the two extremes. The argument is tested with the most recent (2014) waves of data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the European Elections Studies. The analysis suggests different political opportunity structures, and consequently different behavior of radical challenger parties of western Europe. Here, the diverse political economies again correlate with the flavors of radicalism