Elite-Level Conflict Salience and Dimensionality in Western Europe: Concepts and Empirical Findings

ISSN： 0140-2382

Source： West European Politics, Vol.33, Iss.3, 2010-05, pp. : 445-473

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Abstract

This paper uses the Comparative Manifestos Project to explore both the changing salience of different issues on the party-defined political agenda and their structuration in Western Europe from the 1950s through the early 2000s. These measures of the political space, the most extensive time series measures constructed to date, allow the paper to weigh in on elite-level claims of the de-alignment thesis, a complement to analyses operating at the mass level. All in all, the paper finds mixed evidence for the de-alignment thesis. While the rising salience of valence issues and declining salience of references to social groups provide some support for de-alignment, other changes such as the emergence of the post-materialist conflict and the continuing structuration of the political agenda are more commensurate with re-alignment. Arguably contrary to both, however, is the extent to which the same political conflicts dominate the political agenda today as in the past.