Labour and left-wing parties’ programmatic orientations: salience, valence and the impact of the Great Recession

1 Following Hobolt and Tilley (Citation2016), I consider mainstream parties to be those forces that have held governing positions, while challenger parties are those never involved in the governmental arena. Labour issues includes policies generally related to labour, such as worker conditions, training, benefits, and unions. The conceptualisation and its operationalisation are explained in more detail in the third section and follows an inductive approach based on both the MARPOR project and the Comparative Agenda Project (CAP).

2 Following Stokes’ seminal contribution, valence issues can be defined as ‘those that merely involve the linking of the parties with some condition that is positively or negatively valued by the electorate’ (Stokes Citation1963, p. 373). Therefore, valence refers broadly to performance and competence. This can be contrasted with position issues, which are based on distinct policy goals and are linked to partisanship and identity-based voting.

3 According to Allern and Bale (Citation2017, p. 4), left-of-centre parties are ‘the social democratic/labour/socialist/communist parties associated with the old historical labour movement and their effective splitter groups’.

4 I decided not to include more recent data for two main reasons. First, I am interested in gauging the impact of the Great Recession, therefore post-crisis events are not relevant for our argument. Second, recent data (after 2015) are not available yet for some countries.

5 These are general trends; it does not mean that we cannot find exceptions to the rule such as, for instance, the Labour party under Corbyn leadership.

6 From this viewpoint, depoliticisation is associated to valence issues because it involves an evaluation about performance and competence. As Stokes’ (Citation1963) emphasises, valence issues are those policies on which there is no real competition about different policy alternatives.

7 There are many studies that aim to test the ideological (left-right) convergence of political parties and the findings do not always point to the same direction (e.g., Camia & Caramani, Citation2012; Krouwel, Citation2012). However, this kind of analysis goes beyond the scope of this article, which is limited to assess convergence on a specific policy issue.

8 The meaning of ‘traditional’ labour issues is associated to matters such as, among others, (increasing) wages, collective bargaining, social protection, strikes and other forms of protest.

9 The theory is based on the assumption that parties tend to emphasise the issues in which voters perceive them to be more competent or that are deemed essential to their identity. Through the analysis of ‘quasi-sentences’, this project measures the relevance of a specific issue through the whole party program. Higher values correspond to greater importance of the theme in party programmatic orientations.

10 I can only find around ten negative references in Southern Europe since the 1990s. An example can be found in the ND manifesto for the 2015 elections, stating that ‘no business can be closed by strikes that are usually decided on by a small minority, as opposed to the majority of workers’ (ND, Citation2015), as well as the need to reduce the number of public employees as it was understood that they absorbed a disproportionate amount of public resources.

11 New leftist parties that emerged during or after the crisis (for which there are a limited number of observations and it is impossible to map their longitudinal evolution) are excluded.

12 The countries included in the analysis are: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom. I exclude Switzerland given the peculiarities of its political system.

13 It is impossible to provide details on the party stances for all election manifestos. Therefore, this analysis considers the latest manifestos, highlighting the cases in which important shifts took place.

14 This content analysis was performed through Maxqda software, which allows comparing the frequency of selected words in different election manifestos. This enabled me to identify the frequency of the association between terms and the contexts in which they are used.

15 This finding is consistent with Green-Pedersen and Jensen’s (Citation2019) results, which demonstrate a significant association between the traditional left party family and attention to market labour protection. This study, however, is based on a different coding and a different set of countries.

16 Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to explain variations across countries, I performed a correlation analysis between the salience of labour issues and several potential explanatory factors. The results reveal that the level of salience is only moderately correlated with union density (Pearson coefficient r=0.44, p<0.01), and that there is no significant association with support for radical left ideologies (measured at the mass level) or the relevance of the social pact (measured through the ICTWSS dataset).

17 Spain is a peculiar case as joint committee between parties and unions existed at the provincial level (Royo, Citation2005).

18 For instance, for several years UGT leader João Proença has been member of the PS political commission, one of the executive party bodies. Carlos Trindade was also member of the same party body and at the same time one of the CGTP leaders. By the same token, Nicolas Redondo was a well-known socialist leader and headed the Spanish UGT between 1976 and 1994. His successor, Cándido Méndez (UGT leader from 1994 to 2016), had a very similar political background.

19 First, PASOK sponsored the formation of PASKE, and then it followed ND with the creation of DAKE. According to Mavrogordatos (Citation1997) both organisations served mainly as ‘Trojan Horses’ to foster clientelism through the mobilisation of specific clienteles. Yet this situation changed with the ‘modernisation’ of party organisation implemented under the leadership of Simitis and Giorgios Papandreou. In particular, one of the most important organisational reforms implemented in the late 1990s was the abolition of professional branches (Spourdalakis & Tassis, Citation2006). This implied the extinction of the long-standing action committees, which coordinated PASOK’s presence not only in the trade unions but also in the cooperative and agriculture movement and in mass and women’s movements.