Restructuring the Southern European Party Systems in the Great Recession

The article contributes to the debate on whether and in what way the current financial and economic crisis has influenced the restructuring of party competition in Southern Europe. More precisely, we advance and empirically assess the argument that four countries under scrutiny (Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal) have belatedly witnessed the rise of an integration-demarcation divide which has already transformed party competition in North West Europe since the 1990s. In the North West of Europe, this new divide has been mainly articulated in cultural terms as challengers from the populist radical right were most successful in mobilizing the cultural-identitarian anxieties of the so-called losers of globalization and in reframing economic concerns in cultural terms. This is reflected in increasingly salient and polarized conflicts over immigration and European integration which are embedded in a second, non-economic dimension of political conflict. We expect that the pattern of transformation in Southern Europe supports the integration-demarcation argument. However, its specific form should reflect the fact that challengers from the left and the European-level austerity policies seem key to understanding recent developments in Southern Europe. Especially, conflicts over Europe might not be embedded in the cultural dimension but rather restructure the traditional economic left-right divide. Empirically, we study the configuration of party competition in the most recent national election campaigns in Southern Europe (Greece 2014, Italy 2013, Spain 2015, and Portugal 2015) and compare it with the situation in two so-called creditor states (i.e., France 2012 and Germany 2013).