Ecology of Party Strength in Western Europe

Abstract

Following the Lipset-Rokkan cleavage approach, we present an ecological analysis of the electoral outcomes at the regional level of the political parties in 16 European democracies. The search for relationships between voter alignments and the social structure is conducted in terms of a comparative ecology model. Ecological factors at the regional level within each country account for 75% of the variance in support for 93 parties over three elections during the 1970s. More than half of the “regional” variance could be explained by five “structural” properties of the regions: industry, agriculture, affluence, religion, and ethnicity. The impact of these structural properties varied across countries and across party types. Some of the more theoretically interesting variations are discussed for specific countries, individual parties, and party types.