Abstract
This chapter focuses on describing the data, countries, party systems and the macro-level variables used for explaining the empirical patterns in the subsequent chapters. The chapter commences with a brief description of the comparative data set that is used – the European Values Study 2008–2010. The 18 West European countries that are included in the study are then presented. The case is made for grouping the countries into four regions on the basis of party systems and welfare state regimes. The party choice variable used is then presented and political parties are grouped into party families. The final parts of the chapter present the macro-level variables, the measures for advanced industrialism and party system characteristics.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
As a rule, parties that were supported with around 20 respondents or less have been grouped into the “Other parties” category. These are not included in the classification of party families here.
- 4.
Syriza became a unitary party in 2013, several years after the EVS survey.
- 5.
For a thorough overview of the literature of classification of West European Liberal parties, see Steed and Humphreys (1988).
- 6.
Supporters of the Danish Christian Democrats were too few (N = 4) in the data material to be included as a separate category.
- 7.
The People of Freedom was launched by Silvio Berlusconi in late 2007. It was a federation of parties 2007–09, and a separate party from 2009 to 2013 when it was dissolved and Forza Italia was reestablished.
- 8.
The other alternative measure is derived from a work of John Huber on the left–right scale (Huber 1989: 615). He presents a measure that is based on the logic of dummy regression, but which can easily be transformed to an equivalent measure to the logic of variance statistics. This measure can be written as follows:
$$\Sigma {f_i}\left| {{x_i} - \bar x} \right|$$|(x i – x)| is the absolute value of the difference between the mean score on the leftt right scale of voters for party i and the “grand mean”, i.e. the mean (of voters) for all parties. On this measure, unlike the measure advanced by Taylor and Herman, deviations from the overall mean are not squared. For a detailed comparison of these measures, see Knutsen (1998).
- 9.
For a similar two-stage strategy, see Delhey and Newton (2005) analysis of generalised social trust in comparative perspective. They use data from 60 countries based on the World Values Survey. Since they have considerably more countries than in the current work, they are able to perform simple multivariate causal analyses.
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Knutsen, O. (2018). The Data Set and the Party Systems of the 18 Countries. In: Social Structure, Value Orientations and Party Choice in Western Europe. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52123-7_2
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