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CONCLUSION The Redefinition of Cultural Conflicts and the Transformation of Western European Party Systems The New Cultural Conflict and Its Political Manifestation Because of the presence of the historical class and religious cleavages, the space of political alternatives represented in Western European party systems has always been characterized by an economic and a cultural, or value-based, divide. Due to the mobilization of the New Left and the extreme populist right, the cultural divide has been redefined since the 1970s. The educational revolution of the 1960s has resulted in wide embracing of the universalistic norms advocated by the culturally libertarian New Social Movements. In many countries, Social Democratic parties have reacted to the resulting electoral potential by adopting these issues and undergoing a New Left transformation . Ecologist parties have been formed to represent citizens with universalistic outlooks. As a consequence, a libertarian-universalistic value dimension structured party positions on cultural issues in the 1970s, while the political right found it difficult to define an opposing normative ideal that could mobilize broad segments of the populace. After some delay, right-wing populist parties have adopted a new mobilization frame that is conducive to the bonding of the diffuse traditionalist potential. By insisting on the primacy of established cultural practices over the universalistic norms of the New Left and relating this claim to an opposition to immigration, the populist right has contributed to molding a collective consciousness on the part of those who feel alienated by the societal developments of the past decades. The discursive innovation of right-wing 200 / Conclusion populist parties has resulted in the mobilization of an electorate that is characterized by homogeneous traditionalist-communitarian value orientations. Orientations of this kind are not new as such, and their political relevance therefore depends on whether they triumph over attitudes that are related to other conflicts. The mobilization of the new cultural divide is thus the result of the waning of political identities related to class and religion and the corresponding political attachments. On the one hand, modernization and the secularization characteristic of Western European societies have reduced the impact of religion on politics. On the other hand, economic modernization, in conjunction with the processes of globalization and European integration, has weakened economically defined contrasts and collective identities. Right-wing populist parties have therefore benefited not only from the potential of cultural modernization’s losers—which place universalistic values in opposition—but also from economic potentials. Paradoxically, however, they articulate these grievances predominantly in cultural, not economic, terms. With the partial exception of Britain, where the immigration issue has not played an important role until recently, the basic structure of the party political space is remarkably similar in the countries studied in this book. An economic state-market divide and an opposition between libertarian-universalistic and traditionalist-communitarian values came to structure party interactions in France, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany in the 1990s. Britain ’s political space, however, still showed similarities with that of the other countries in the 1970s, before the issue of community came to dominate cultural politics. In Germany, the established right launched the issues of immigration and traditionalism in the early 1980s, and even in the absence of a rightwing populist party, those issues played a role in the election campaigns of the 1990s. The prevalence of orientations in the German electorate similar to those on which right-wing populist parties thrive underlines the need for a theory to explain both the magnitude and the timing of the success of right-wing populist parties. Political Conflict, Party Strategies, and the Transformation of Party Systems in France, Switzerland, and Germany Political conflict plays a central role in perpetuating the political identities that underlie cleavages. Strong identities shaped by historical conflicts may stabilize alignments for some time, but if interactions in the party system do not reinforce the underlying divisions, voters will no longer be firmly anchored in the old structure of conflict. Consequently, the obstacles for mobilizing new divisions decrease. The lack of conflict along one dimension can also lead to the growing salience of another existing or suppressed division and to the ascendance of the corresponding group attachments. The model developed in this volume focuses on the lines of opposition prevalent in election campaigns and on the attitudes Cultural Conflicts and Western European Party Systems / 201 and political loyalties they entail at the voter level. It assesses how rooted voters are in the traditional conflicts but can also be used to study how established political...

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