European Party Politics in Times of Crisis

"Introduction Our key question in this book is how the multiple crises that Europe faced in the aftermath of the Great Recession influenced the intensity and structuration of political conflict in national party systems.In particular,we ask how the cultural integration-demarcation divide that had been shaping up in north-western Europe before the onset of the Great Recession was affected by these multiple crises and whether this divide was 'traveling' to the European south and east. Figure 1.1: Theoretical framework Embedding the economic crisis in a long-term perspective As outlined,we first introduce the three long-term structural factors that we consider to have had a decisive influence on the structuration of party competition in the long run.As shown in Figure 1.1,these are long-term processes of societal change,regime legacies and the ever more important multi-level system of European governance. /or fascist regimes.Only in Italy did the fascist right survive the fall of the regime and was able to organise itself openly.But,paradoxically,the Italian neo-fascists started to decline at the very moment when the radical right began its rise in NWE,precisely because of their solid