European Party Politics in Times of Crisis

Cultural Backlash? Trends in Opinion Polarisation between Educational Groups in Five European Countries

“…Similar to Norris and Inglehart´s (2019) cultural backlash theory, globalization cleavage theory also expects an increasing attitudinal gap between low and high educated citizens on culturalrelated issues (Hutter and Kriesi 2019;Kriesi et al 2008). Accordingly, increasing globalization pressures lead to the polarization of citizens into groups of winners and losers who support antagonistic positions with respect to globalization-related issues and, more broadly, issues on the cultural dimension.…”

“…France, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Sweden. We selected these countries because they represent the largest EU member states from a diverse set of regions (Scandinavia, Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe) that have been shown to vary in the landscape of political mobilization and underlying cleavage structures (Borbáth and Gessler 2020;Hutter and Kriesi 2019). These are also the EU countries with the largest success of right-wing populist parties during their latest national elections, making them the most likely case to observe the implications of Norris and Inglehart's theory.…”

“…Thus, we are most likely to find evidence in favour of cultural backlash theory in these countries. Furthermore, they represent the diversity of cleavage structures, party competition, and protest mobilization in Europe (Borbáth and Gessler 2020;Hutter and Kriesi 2019).…”