Challenging the Decline of Party’s Representative Role: A Comparative Analysis of Evolutions of Party’ Group Appeals in European Democracies (1960-2024)

Political parties’ group appeals have gained renewed attention in the scholarship, particularly as democracies worldwide experience rising group-based polarization (Boese et al. 2022). This study investigates how parties appeal to social groups (e.g. nurses, workers and youths), defending their interests against the perceived dominance of other groups (e.g. hedge fund managers, Tech CEOs and business owners). Historically, group-based mobilization is rooted in Lipset & Rokkan’s (1967) cleavage theory, where political parties were the political arms of social groups, channelling their interests into democratic systems. This central role of political parties has eroded as group-based mobilizations declined because of voters’ dealignment under modernization processes (Beck 2006), the waning of (traditional) ideological cleavages (Mair 2003, Kriesi 2012), demobilization of party organizations (Van haute & Gauja 2016), and the rise of personalized politics over party politics (Rahat & Kenig 2018). Under these transformations, we argue that parties’ use of group appeals has not disappeared but has reshaped significantly since the “golden age of mass parties” in the 1960s. Our hypotheses test how traditional parties have broadened their positive group appeals over time, while they have reduced negative group framings against outgroups as party competition declined (Mair 2003). Furthermore, we hypothesize a spillover effect of party system transformations as challenger and niche parties entered the electoral arenas. Our contribution seeks to provide a comparative analysis in seven European democracies. For that goal, we analyse ‘day-to-day’ parliamentary speeches (1960–2024), relying on supervised deep learning techniques (i.e. Natural Language Inference using a fine-tuned multilingual encoder model EuroBert). We categorize group appeals into six meta-categories and explore their evolution over time: (1) Socio-demographic groups, (2) Socio-economic groups, (3) Occupational professional groups, (4) Non-economic social groups, (5) European and international groups, and (6) surrogate groups for non-human entities. This contribution presents the results for a pilot study on the UK (≈ 54 million parliamentary sentences). Ultimately, this research seeks to highlight how parties’ strategies of group appeals have reshaped over the last decades as European democracies experienced societal transformations.