The implications of political polarization for the mass public have been a matter of concern for both American and European scholars. In the US, where a process of growing polarization is well documented in the literature, the main concern is whether the increased ideological conflict between political elites is dividing the citizens as well. In Europe the focus is put on how cross-country differences in party dispersion account for varying levels of political engagement and determinants of vote choice. The aim of our study is to investigate the association between ideological polarization and opinion conflict among European electorates. We follow a conceptualization of public opinion polarization as alignment across multiple issue domains proposed by Baldassarri & Gelman (2008). The more the lines of disagreement in the public opinion overlap, the deeper we expect the societal conflict to be. We offer a novel cross-country investigation of this phenomenon using data from 27 EU countries. We link the societal polarization on 11 issues to party system characteristics and show distinctive patterns depending on country blocks in the EU. Although party polarization is positively associated with societal polarization overarching multiple issues, we find that conceptualizing political polarization as a dividing force acting upon public opinion does not apply for all cases. These distinctions map onto the distinction between Western European democracies and Central Eastern European democracies, suggesting that different stages of party system consolidation mediate the effect of supply side polarization on societal alignment. Accordingly, our results speak to the extensive literature addressing systemic differences in political competition and issue voting across European democracies.
