The study of how party systems are structured across territorial lines is a crucial research topic for political scientists, and one fraught with consequences for the political system and the democratic process. Cleavages, Institutions and Competition addresses this topic and raises the following questions: How has vote nationalisation evolved in Western Europe during the past fifty years, and which factors account for its variation across Western European party systems? This book answers these questions through a macro-comparative perspective and an original empirical research based on 230 parliamentary elections in 16 countries between 1965 and 2015. The result is a far-reaching understanding of the constellation of factors involved in the process of vote nationalisation, including macro-sociological, institutional and competition determinants.

This book offers a systematic and far-reaching account of party system institutionalization in Western Europe. Drawing upon a wide array of data and through a comparison of 20 countries from the end of WWII to 2019 across three arenas of party competition (electoral, parliamentary, and governmental ones), the empirical analysis shows that, over the past decade, the level of institutionalization in the Western European party systems has dramatically declined compared with previous decades. Electoral, parliamentary, and - in some cases - governmental instability and unpredictability have reached record-high levels. Although the impact of the 2008 Great Recession has certainly worked as a catalyst, this process of de-institutionalization has been mainly driven by long-term factors, such as cleavage decline and length of democratic experience. Moreover, its consequences are relevant not only for the relationship between parties and voters, but also for the very quality of democracy, as party system deinstitutionalization causes a decline in the citizens' satisfaction of the way democracy works and even an erosion of the 'objective' democratic standards. In a nutshell, Western Europe, once seen as the land of stability and the cradle of democracy, may have become the land of party system deinstitutionalization and incipient democratic backsliding.

The study of how party systems are structured across territorial lines is a crucial research topic for political scientists, and one fraught with consequences for the political system and the democratic process. Cleavages, Institutions and Competition addresses this topic and raises the following questions: How has vote nationalisation evolved in Western Europe during the past fifty years, and which factors account for its variation across Western European party systems? This book answers these questions through a macro-comparative perspective and an original empirical research based on 230 parliamentary elections in 16 countries between 1965 and 2015. The result is a far-reaching understanding of the constellation of factors involved in the process of vote nationalisation, including macro-sociological, institutional and competition determinants.