Long gone are the times when class-based political parties with
extensive membership dominated politics. Instead, party politics
has become issue-based. Surprisingly few studies have focused on
how the issue content of West European party politics has developed
over the past decades. Empirically, Reshaping of West European
Party Politics studies party politics in Belgium, Denmark, France,
Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK from 1980 and onwards.
This book highlights the more complex party system agenda with the
decline, but not disappearance, of macroeconomic issues as well as
the rise in 'new politics' issues together with education and
health care. Moreover, various 'new politics' issues such as
immigration, the environment, and European integration have seen
very different trajectories. To explain the development of the
individual issues, this volume develops a new theoretical model
labelled the 'issue incentive model' of party system attention. The
aim of the model is to explain how much attention issues get
throughout the party system, which is labelled 'the party system
agenda'. To explain the development of the party system agenda, one
needs to focus on the incentives that individual policy issues
offer to large, mainstream parties, i.e. the typical Social
Democratic, Christian Democratic, or Conservative/Liberal parties
that have dominated West European governments for decades. The core
idea of the model is that the incentives that individual policy
issues offer to these vote and office-seeking parties depend on
three factors, namely issue characteristics, issue ownership, and
coalition considerations. The issue incentive model builds on and
develops a top-down perspective on which the issue content of party
politics is determined by the strategic considerations of political
parties and their competition with each other. Comparative Politics
is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political
science that deals with contemporary government and politics.
Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress
on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The
series is published in association with the European Consortium for
Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The
series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political
Science, Universite libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Muller-Rommel,
Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana
University; and Susan Scarrow, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of
Political Science, University of Houston.
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