Dr Jon Wheatley

In the last decade the term culture war has become hard to avoid. If it is not yet the buzzword of the first part of the twenty-first century, it soon will be. Culture wars seem to be around us everywhere. Each passing week brings some new mention of an outbreak in a public institution, civic space or political arena in some part of the globe. Culture wars are the phenomenon we cannot seem to shake. Battle lines are drawn, rhetorical tools are sharpened and social media awash with vitriol and moralising, and seemingly unbridgeable social gaps. If the immediate post-Cold War period did usher in an era of universal global liberalism, decades on it is now far in the distance, only visible in the rear-view mirror. Instead, around us lie social and political fault lines featuring competing visions of what should be the appropriate normative basis upon which societies should be constituted. They are debates that focus on belonging, on citizenship, on rights and identities.

The role of ideology in political competition in the former Soviet Union is under researched. This paper uses public opinion data to identify and investigate patterns of political competition in Georgia. I find voters’ preferences on a range of issues to be underpinned by a latent cultural dimension of political ideology that concerns how citizens view the relationship between the Georgian nation and the rest of the world. I go on to present evidence that this dimension is, at least to some extent, both embedded in social structure and reflected in voting patterns. 

Scholars seeking to understand political competition in Europe have proposed various models of political dimensionality. While most scholars draw on data from the supply side of politics (political parties), demand side (voter) studies remain few. In this paper we compare the two approaches. The main difference is that while supply side approaches suggest a single model of dimensionality that can be applied to all EU countries, demand side approaches suggest a greater degree of divergence. In particular, the bundle of issues commonly identified by supply side studies as TAN/GAL not only fail to form a coherent dimension when viewed from a demand side perspective, but incorporate issues of EU integration in some (northern European) cases, but not in others.

The authors present a dataset that contains the positions of 231 political parties across 28 countries on 30 policy issues that were considered salient for the 2014 elections to the European Parliament. The party position estimates were originally used in a voter information tool which compared the policy preferences of citizens to those of political parties. The paper discusses the estimation method in the context of the literature on estimating party positions, outlines the coding methodology, and introduces the value of the dataset for third-party users interested in studying political participation and representation.

Despite the global growth in the use of Voter Advice Applications (VAAs), which advise users on how similar their own policy views are to the policy positions of the political parties, there have been few field experiments that isolate the causal effects of VAA use on party support. Nor has there been much investigation of how VAAs may help to ameliorate ethnically based voting divisions by refocusing voter attention on other issues. This article draws on evidence from a field experiment in the deeply divided context of Northern Ireland. We find that at the individual level party preferences are somewhat more closely related to voter ideology after the provision of advice. Yet, at the aggregate level, we find no evidence that advice leads to weaker ethno-national structuring of party support. These results suggest that while receiving advice from VAAs has some impact on users’ party preferences, there is no observable overall impact on support levels for the ethno-national blocs in Northern Ireland.