Decreased Ideological Polarization and Conflict in Western Europe? (DIPAC) Government Declaration Data

A widely argued view is that dominant mainstream parties have become less ideologically distinct over time. Still, although this is a dominant and reoccurring thesis, we argue that it is largely unsubstantiated. Therefore, the goal of this project is to systematically compare the evolution of ideas and policies supplied by political parties, from the 1970s to the 2010s, in eight Western European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and United Kingdom. The project aimed to answer the following two questions: To what extent are the ideas and policies of political parties converging or diverging in Western European party systems? Are changes in the parties’ ideas and policies initiated mainly by the parties, or are they adjusting to voter demand arising from social changes? Additionally, the project breaks new ground by testing central hypotheses of party system changes on unique data. We study government declaration with in-depth, qualitative, analyses of the actual ideas expressed in these documents, over time. The aim has been to collect all types of data as close as possible to the middle of each decade, i.e., close to 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005 and 2015. The project works with various data files. In this part, the project focuses on government declarations in Western Europe from the 1970s through the 2010s.