Political competition has become increasingly centered around a cultural cleavage, dividing green, alternative, and libertarian (GAL) positions from traditionalist, authoritarian, and nationalist (TAN) stances. By overtly focusing on the party-level, scholarship so far has treated the set of issues within the GAL-TAN dimension as a cohesive whole, overlooking potential cross-national variation and relying on an implicit assumption of equivalence. Addressing this assumption, this paper investigates how the specific issues that citizens bundle together to form this cleavage diverge across countries. I argue that elite polarization and far-right issue entrepreneurship influence citizens’ incorporation of a particular issue into the cultural cleavage. Looking at two more peripheral issues on the cultural cleavage, LGBTQ rights and climate change, this study uses multilevel structural equation modelling to analyze how elite cues shape citizens’ embedding of these issues into the cultural dimension across 31 European countries. The findings suggest that party polarization strongly affects whether citizens link an issue to core GAL-TAN issues, while far-right issue entrepreneusrhip does not. In contexts where parties are more polarized along an issue, citizens’ attitudes towards it are more strongly linked to their views on immigration and European integration. These results challenge the assumption of a uniform cultural cleavage across Europe and highlight how party polarization can act as an elite cue that guides different patterns of issue-bundling among citizens.
