Party Families in Western Europe

Party Families in Western Europe

This book, on party families and party categorisations in Western Europe, was published by Routledge in July 2023. It is available here. If you'd like to use the party family schema developed in the book in your research or teaching, there are publicly available scripts in R and Stata to recreate the party family schema for the European Social Survey (2016-2020), the European Values Study (2017), the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (2019), and the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). You can find these below.

Summary of the book

This comprehensive and comparative book makes clear what party families are and, in doing so, helps categorise and make sense of parties in different countries. It describes the ideology of the families in Western Europe as well as classifying political parties accordingly. Furthermore, the book examines who the party families’ supporters are in terms of their social background and political values. What role do class, education, and religion play in the 21st century?

Finally, the book provides a discussion of the degree to which the concept of party families is still meaningful in the 21st century and how it needs to be studied comparatively and comprehensively. Is party family still valid as a conceptual device to classify and compare parties across countries in Western Europe?

This text will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners working in the field of political behaviour, political parties and party politics, policy studies, and more broadly comparative and European politics.

Scripts to recreate party family schema

Stata

ESS 2016, Stata do-file  
ESS 2018, Stata do-file
ESS 2020, Stata do-file

EVS 2017, Stata do-file

CHES 2019, Stata do-file

CMP, 2016-2020, Stata do-file

R

R syntax files for ESS 2016, 2018, 2020; EVS 2017; CHES 2019; and CMP 2016-2020 are available here.

Many thanks to Bjørn Rønning Fjærli who wrote the original R scripts and to Haakon Gjerløw who helped edit the R scripts. The scripts may contain errors, please confer the book for authoritative versions of the party family schema. Please let me know if you come across any errors so I may correct them.