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4 Research Design and Methods T his chapter lays out and illustrates the procedure and the methods used in the subsequent country analyses. Adopting the structure of the chapters to come, the discussion has three main parts. The first step is to investigate the dimensionality of political space and to determine the positions parties take within it. I therefore start by describing in more detail than in Chapter 2 the campaign data used in this study and discuss at some length the interpretation of the configurations resulting from the Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) analysis. The second section illustrates, step by step, the measurement of the elements needed to deploy the model set out in Chapter 3 and summarized in Figure 3.2. This analysis relies on the campaign data and on four post-election surveys in each country. Since the methods I use differ from those employed in prior research, the theoretical rationale for these procedures is discussed in detail. Drawing on examples from the French case study, I explain the measurement of (1) the positions of parties and voters along the dimensions found to structure oppositions within the party system; (2) the internal heterogeneity of the stances of parties and their voters; and (3) the match between the positions of parties and voters. The third section discusses the additional analyses performed in each chapter, which refer to hypotheses developed in Chapters 1 and 3. First, I use individuals’ positions along the relevant dimensions of conflict as voting determinants to assess which of these dimensions parties mobilize on and who right-wing populist parties’ main antagonists are. Probing further into the structure of oppositions from the perspective of voters refines and 72 / Chapter 4 corroborates the analysis by linking political supply and political demand according to a more strictly causal logic. I also introduce the class schema used in later chapters and develop hypotheses concerning the propensity of various classes to support the populist right. As a final step in the analyses to come, I verify the degree to which the heterogeneity of the right-wing populist voters’ economic preferences is related to social class. My hypothesis from Chapter 3 is that social class continues to matter in the formation of economic preferences, but that these preferences are irrelevant for electoral choices as long as cultural orientations appear more central to the voters of the populist right. Determining the Dimensionality of Parties’ Programmatic Offer The Campaign Data To identify the lines of conflict structuring political competition in democratic elections, I rely on data based on the media coverage of election campaigns in six European countries. These data have been collected within the research project National Political Change in a Denationalizing World (Kriesi et al. 2006). It covers one election in the 1970s and three more recent elections that took place between the late 1980s and the early 2000s in France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany , the Netherlands, and Britain. Parties’ programmatic offerings are coded in the two months preceding each election. The election in the 1970s serves as a point of reference before the most recent restructuring of conflicts in Western European party systems took place. More specifically, in the 1970s we expect a situation in which the first transformation of the traditional political space took place under the mobilization of the New Left. The second transformation, driven by the rise of the New Right, is traced in the three more recent contests. In all countries except France, the focus of the analysis is on parliamentary elections. France is the exception because presidential elections are more important than legislative elections as a consequence of the country’s semi-presidential regime, which makes the study of presidential contests more promising. Because no suitable surveys are available for presidential elections in the 1970s, however, the first campaign studied is the 1978 parliamentary contest. For each election, we selected all articles related to the electoral contest or politics in general during the two months preceding election day in a high-quality newspaper and a tabloid. These were Die Presse and Kronenzeitung in Austria, Le Monde and Le Parisien in France, NRC Handelsblad and Algemeen Dagblad in the Netherlands, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Blick in Switzerland, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bild in Germany , and The Times and The Sun in Britain. Because the number of relevant articles varies a great deal between countries, we did not code every daily issue in all cases. Switzerland and France are two strongly contrasting examples, with the number of articles...

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