Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Part I Theory and methods
- 1 Globalization and its impact on national spaces of competition
- 2 Contexts of party mobilization
- 3 The design of the study: the distinguishing characteristics of our approach
- Part II Country studies
- Part III Comparative analyses
- Appendix A Technical appendix
- Appendix B Detailed statistical results
- References
- Index
2 - Contexts of party mobilization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Part I Theory and methods
- 1 Globalization and its impact on national spaces of competition
- 2 Contexts of party mobilization
- 3 The design of the study: the distinguishing characteristics of our approach
- Part II Country studies
- Part III Comparative analyses
- Appendix A Technical appendix
- Appendix B Detailed statistical results
- References
- Index
Summary
According to our assumptions outlined in the previous chapter, the political potentials created by the new cleavage are rather similar from one Western European democracy to the other. All these countries are characterized by increasingly comparable social, economic and cultural context conditions. Defined in most general terms, the relevant societal context characteristics which determine the political potential of the new cleavage in a given country include the relative strength of the country's traditional cleavages, the overall level of its economic and human development, its traditional openness to the world markets and its integration into the global community, its current economic difficulties, and its definition of the national community and the perceived threat to this community by processes of denationalization. While insisting on the broadly similar societal contexts of our six countries, we shall also point out some variability with regard to these general context characteristics, variability which mainly depends on the size of the countries. Three of our six countries belong to the small European democracies – Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands in that order – while our three other countries – France, the United Kingdom and Germany – are the three largest European democracies. In this chapter, we shall first consider one by one the societal context characteristics before moving on to a presentation of the more political context conditions.
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- West European Politics in the Age of Globalization , pp. 23 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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