Transitions seminar | When the old meets the new

Over the last half-century, the structure and nature of political competition has undergone major transformations in most European democracies, accelerated by the catalytic effect of the Great Recession of 2008. The marked but partial decline of the historical cleavages and the organisations that claimed them has generated a hybrid situation in which established parties and new players coexist, and in which old and new logics of confrontation intersect.

The aim of this research project is to understand the influence(s) this hybrid situation exerts on both the established players and the new entrants to political competition, at both ideological and organisational levels. It hypothesises that the effects on these two types of player are exactly the opposite: while the partial resilience of the historical cleavages is pushing the new players towards accelerated ideological and organisational standardisation, their relative decline is encouraging the traditional parties to innovate in these two areas.

To do this, the research team will compare the ideological and organisational developments of two parties (the main centre-left party and its new competitor, which has emerged over the last decade) in four countries where there are significant differences in the degree of resilience/decline of the cleavages (Italy, Belgium, France and Spain), using interviews and discourse analysis. The central aim is to grasp, within the same theoretical framework, the apparently contradictory recompositions leading to a hybridisation of the content and modalities of political competition in Europe.