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INTRODUCTION A Dynamic Perspective on Cleavages and the Populist Right Value Divides and the Transformation of Western European Party Systems The continuing presence of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe’s political landscape since the 1990s is a phenomenon that escapes explanations centered on the level of individual countries. In spite of the split in 1998, Jean-Marie Le Pen came in second in the French 2002 presidential elections. He received a respectable share of the vote even in 2007, faced with a Gaullist candidate who heavily emphasized law-and-order stances and whose credibility in implementing important policy changes was obviously higher than that of a challenger no other party accepts as a coalition partner. In Austria, Jörg Haider and a handful of faithful followers left the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Austrian Freedom Party; FPÖ),the party they had led to unprecedented electoral successes in the 1990s, after internal disputes. Nonetheless, together the FPÖ and the new Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (Alliance for the Future of Austria; BZÖ) received no less than 28 percent of the vote in the 2008 election. In Switzerland, the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party; SVP) has become the country’s strongest party and gained a second seat in the country’s executive Federal Council in 2003. Strong right-wing populist parties also exist in Flemish Belgium and in Denmark. The populist right has become firmly entrenched in countries that differ markedly in terms of their institutions, party systems, and political cultures. Right-wing populist parties should be seen, I suggest in this book, in the larger context of changing societal structures that have affected party systems 2 / Introduction since the late 1960s. While European party systems continue to carry the stamp of historical class and religious cleavages, the dimensions underlying party interactions have been transformed. A first restructuring of political space occurred as a consequence of the mobilization of the New Social Movements of the left in the 1970s and 1980s (Kitschelt 1994). This process has led to a transformation of Social Democratic parties as well as to the emergence of Green or ecologist parties, as I will refer to them, which have come to constitute the left-libertarian pole of a new cultural dimension of conflict that has succeeded the value divisions characteristic of the religious cleavage. Spurred by the educational revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the diffusion of universalistic values has thus led actors to call for the political enforcement of the principle of individual autonomy and the free choice of lifestyles. In a longer perspective, these developments can be seen as part of a long-term trend of secularization, as Scott Flanagan and Aie-Rie Lee (2003) have argued. Already in the 1980s, however, the contours of an opposing conception of community and of a different justification of moral principles had emerged in the form of the neo-conservative movement. Intellectuals and conservative political parties placed a renewed emphasis on tradition as a necessary binding force for society and propagated solidarity in established communities, such as the family, as an antidote to the perils of individualization. While neo-conservatism remained an elitist ideology, the conservative counter-movement to the libertarian left gained momentum when the populist right, a new party type, succeeded in framing the question of identity and community in terms of “us” and “the other.” By putting the issues of immigration and the alleged inability to integrate people with different cultural backgrounds onto the political agenda, the populist right drove a second transformation of the dimensions of political conflict in the 1990s (Kriesi et al. 2006). Contrary to classical extreme-right parties, the populist right does not adhere to racism and does not reject other cultures as such; it advocates an “ethno-pluralist” ideal of preserving the distinctive traditions of national cultures. As a consequence, a new cultural conflict gained center stage in Western European party systems in the 1990s. One side holds universalistic conceptions of community and advocates individual autonomy; the other emphasizes the right to preserve traditional communities in which common moral understandings have developed and are seen as threatened by multicultural society. These opposing positions mirror contemporary debates between liberals and communitarians in political philosophy, and in their extreme form they constitute the poles of a political dimension of conflict that runs from libertarian-universalistic to traditionalist-communitarian values. While liberal philosophers such as John Rawls (1971) emphasize universally binding norms, even moderate communitarians such as Michael Walzer (1983) are reluctant to grant...

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