Filling the blanks. Political parties, interest groups, and representation of civil society
ENI investigate whether both political parties and interest groups carry the same type of representational biases or whether the latter could make up for parties’ shifts towards certain types of electorate. To empirically verify this assumption, I map groups’ and parties’ positions on Gal-Tan and economic matters. The Gal- Tan dimension (green, alternative, libertarian versus traditional, authoritarian, nationalist) has become increasingly popular among scholars investigating party stances on Europeanization (Hooghe et al., 2002). Regarding economic matters, where parties are set apart by different points of view on economic redistribution, welfare, and government regulation of the economy, it allows researchers to map political parties on four ideological quadrants (left-tan, right-tan, left-gal, and right-gal) (Vachudova & Hooghe, 2009). As party competition has recently been dictated not only by the left-right division, Gal-Tan adds multidimensionality regarding the socio-cultural dimension. I analyze six countries – three from CEE (Poland, Slovenia, and Lithuania) and three from Western Europe (Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands). Both regions have had diverging trajectories of party politics (Vachudova & Hooghe, 2009). The collapse of communism in the East, Europeanization, and, last but not the least, the lack of societal embeddedness, created completely different dynamics for the institutionalization of political parties and civil societies.
