This book is the result of a joint project of two teams of political scientists, one at the University of Zurich, the other at the University of Munich. The origins of this project date back to a hot summer afternoon in 2001, when Hanspeter Kriesi gave a presentation of some of his ideas about the impact of globalization on the transformation of Western European party systems before the special research programme (SFB) on ‘Reflexive modernization’ at the Technical University of Munich. The presentation was well received by the small audience of dedicated colleagues who did bear with the heat. Edgar Grande reacted by proposing to set up a joint comparative research project designed to test these largely speculative ideas. Eventually, the project got going in late 2002, with the joint support of the German Research Foundation (SFB 536 – Project C5), and of the Swiss National Science Foundation (1214-68010.02). Martin Dolezal together with several research assistants joined Edgar Grande to form the Munich team, while Simon Bornschier, Timotheos Frey, Romain Lachat and Hanspeter Kriesi constituted the Zurich team.

The two teams closely collaborated from the start, and evenly divided the challenging task of data collection in six selected countries – Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK – between them. We assembled data both for the political supply by the parties, and for the political demand by the voters.