National Political Change in a Globalizing World
Aim and Scope of the Project
Organizational Affiliations and Funding
Staff
Publications
Related Research
Aim and Scope of the Project
Phase I (2002-2006)
The political consequences of the process of globalization are manifold. National politics are challenged both 'from above', through new forms of international cooperation and through a process of supranational integration, and 'from below', at the regional and local level. However, nation states do not lose their significance. It is a paradox of this process of change that the political reactions to economic and cultural globalization are bound to manifest themselves at the national level. As a consequence, national political cleavages do not lose their importance, but undergo a process of fundamental change. The emergence and articulation of these new cleavages are being examined in this research project.
Phase II (2007-2011)
Globalization brings about new structural conflicts, both between and within national contexts. In a first phase (2002-2006), this research project dealt with an analysis of these conflict potentials, on the one hand, and with their mobilization at the national level by political parties. In a second phase (2006-2009), we extend our research field: On the one hand, we analyze more recent elections to confirm our hypotheses. On the other hand, we look at transnational processes and non-institutionalized political actors. For this we study the transformation of structural conflicts by analyzing European Elections, protest events, and public debates in our six countries.
Organizational Affiliations and Funding
This project is conducted in collaboration by the Departments of Comparative Politics at the LMU Munich and University of Zurich. The Swiss project team is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the German team is part of the Sonderforschungsbereichs 536 "Reflexive Modernisierung" of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
Staff
Phase I and II
Phase I
Phase II
Publications
The following publications were accomplished in the context of the project. They include Ph.D. theses, journal articles and books directly established by the project teams, and journal articles which rely on data compiled in one of the two project phases.
Books
Kriesi, Hanspeter, Edgar Grande, Martin Dolezal, Marc Helbling, Dominic Höglinger, Swen Hutter and Bruno Wueest (2008). Restructuring Political Conflict in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bornschier, Simon (2010). Cleavage Politics and the Populist Right. The New Cultural Conflict in Western Europe. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Frey, Timotheos (2009). Die Christdemokratie in Westeuropa. Der schmale Grat zum Erfolg. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Kriesi, Hanspeter, Edgar Grande, Romain Lachat, Martin Dolezal, Simon Bornschier and Timotheos Frey (2008). West European Politics in the Age of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Journal Articles
Kriesi, Hanspeter (forthcoming). "Personalization of national election campaigns", Party Politics.
Bornschier, Simon (forthcoming). "Why a Right-Wing Populist Party Emerged in France but not in Germany: Cleavages and Actors in the Formation of a New Cultural Divide", European Political Science Review.
Helbling, Marc (2011). "Rechtspopulismus als Ideologie und der neue Integrations-Exklusions Cleavage in Westeuropa", Berliner Debatte Initial Heft 1 (special Issue on Comparative Perspectives in Contemporary Populism).
Helbling, Marc and Anke Tresch (2011). "Measuring Party Positions and Issue Salience from Media Coverage: Discussing and Crossvalidating New Indicators", Electoral Studies 30(1): 174-183.
Wueest, Bruno, Simon Clematide, Alexandra Bünzli, Daniel Laupper and Timotheos Frey (2011). "Electoral Campaigns and Relation Mining: Extracting Semantic Network Data from Newspaper Articles", Journal of Information Technology and Politics 8 (forthcoming).
Bornschier, Simon (2010). "The new cultural divide and the two-dimensional space in Western Europe", West European Politics 33(3): 419–444.
Dolezal, Martin, Marc Helbling and Swen Hutter (2010). "Debates over Islam in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland: Between Ethnic Citizenship, State-Church Relations and Right-Wing Populism," West European Politics 33(2): 171-190.
Helbling, Marc, Dominic Höglinger and Bruno Wueest (2010). "How Political Parties Frame European Integration," European Journal of Political Research 49(4): 495-521.
Bornschier, Simon and Romain Lachat (2009). "The evolution of the French political space and party system", West European Politics 32(2): 360-383.
Hutter, Swen and Marco Giugni (2009). "Protest Politics in a Changing Political Context: Switzerland, 1975-2005", Swiss Political Science Review 15(3): 427-461.
Dolezal, Martin, Marc Helbling and Swen Hutter (2008): "Zwischen Gipfelkreuz und Halbmond. Die Auseinandersetzung um den Islam in Österreich und der Schweiz, 1998-2007", Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 37(4): 401-417.
Dolezal, Martin und Swen Hutter (2007). "Konsensdemokratie unter Druck? Politischer Protest in Österreich, 1975-2005," Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 36(3): 337-352.
Kriesi, Hanspeter (2007). "The Role of European Integration in National Election Campaigns," European Union Politics 8(1): 83-108.
Kriesi, Hanspeter, Edgar Grande, Romain Lachat, Martin Dolezal, Simon Bornschier and Timotheos Frey (2006). "Globalization and the transformation of the national political space: six European countries compared", European Journal of Political Research 45(6): 921–956. Tables
Related Research
The Politicization of Europe is a related research project which closely connects to the main findings of the two project phases, both in theoretical and empirical terms. For more information, please visit the project's website at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute for Political Science, LMU Munich.