The structure of West European Policy Spaces: A stable mismatch or increasing alignment between voters and parties?

West European countries are characterized by multiple lines of conflict. The two most dominant conflict lines are defined by the traditional cleavages on the role of the state in the economy, and by the role of the (Kriesi et al., 2006; Thomassen, 2012; Hooghe and Marks, 2009). These two cleavages shape much of the political conflict on economic and moral policy issues. Besides that, other, so-called new cultural issues increasingly gain importance in shaping West European policy spaces. These include topics like immigration and integration, as well as questions of environmental protection, energy, and climate change or issues concerning the rights and roles of women and (increasingly so) other non-male genders in the family and society. While parties' standpoints on the two dominant issue domains are highly correlated the picture deviates slightly on new cultural issues: there often exists a niche party that takes an extreme standpoint. All other parties, however, take position at a point similar to theirs on one or both of the dominant conflict lines. The pattern of party competition is thus highly structured, stable over time and very similar across West European countries, which lets many scholars to conclude that West European party systems are essentially two-dimensional. We know much less about the structure of public opinion on the side of the voters. Empirical research indicates that voters' preferences are generally less structured than the pattern of party configuration (Nie and Andersen, 1974; Lupton, Myers and Thornton, 2015), which is often explained by a lack of political sophistication among the broad public. From a normative standpoint, it might however be desirable to have pluralist electorates in which preferences on distinct salient lines of political conflict are only weakly correlated to counter partisan sorting and affective polarization (Disch 2021). If such unstructured, pluralist electorates get confronted with a highly-structured or even unidimensional party system, this will lead to issue cross-pressures and representation gaps (Kurella and Rosset, 2017; Rosset and Kurella, 2021). Policy alignment on the side of the party system is thus to be regarded with caution if the structure of public opinion is multidimensional. We take this as motivation to analyze West European electorates, by asking first for the relevant dimensions that shape public opinion and second, whether they become increasingly aligned with the dominant conflict lines. We formulate two hypotheses on when to expect policy alignment on the side of the voters. The first relies on party persuasion as a mechanism and postulates that citizens’ preferences on new-cultural issues become increasingly aligned with a dominant conflict line, the more parties emphasize the policy issue and incorporate it in their general left-right ideological framework. The second hypothesis considers instances in which issues gain electoral salience because of external events and social movements. In these situations, we do not expect issue alignment on the side of the voters, reflecting the original low structure of public opinion. We test these hypotheses based on a combination of data from the EVS and manifesto project, covering the period from 1990-2017.