Changes in the occupational structure and political economy of advanced capitalism, explained in Daniel Oesch's chapter in this volume, and related shifts in the formation of political mass preferences, examined by Silja Häusermann and Hanspeter Kriesi in the subsequent chapter, are consequential for political partisan alignments, the subject of this chapter. As previously small occupational groups with distinct political preference profiles gained numerical weight in the electorate, particularly highly educated sociocultural professionals, established party families saw their vote shares decline, unless they modified their programmatic appeals. Established parties with new strategies or new party creations went on to capture novel voter coalitions, a process that has played out in cross-nationally diverse ways.

Shifts in electoral partisan coalitions coincided with (1) a steep decline in party membership; (2) a moderate to sharp increase in electoral volatility signaling the availability of more voters to competing party appeals; (3) a decline in voter turnout, as people no longer acted simply on parental party identifications or associational ties; and (4) a corresponding rise of nonpartisan social movements and interest groups. At least three rival theoretical arguments have claimed to make sense of party system change in postindustrial democracies, all consistent with these basic facts: the postindustrial realignment; the postindustrial dealignment; and the cartel party detachment perspectives. Examining empirical trends over time and cross-national variance among party systems, we conclude that a political realignment perspective explains observable patterns best.

Three Perspectives on Postindustrial Political Alignments

The disagreements on political alignments concern facts about the nature of citizen-politician linkages and causal mechanisms that produce them in postindustrial democracies. There are three prominent perspectives on this topic:

1. • Postindustrial Realignment (PiR): Voters continue to coalesce around parties on the basis of durable socioeconomic interests and policy preferences, but since political-economic postindustrialization, highlighted by changing occupational profiles, has changed the distribution of preferences, established parties have been compelled to alter their appeals or tolerate the electoral success of new parties that represent voter preferences ignored by established alternatives.

2. […]

The present volume is a sequel to two distinguished predecessors. Sixteen years have gone by since the publication of Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (1999), itself a follow-up to the earlier Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1984). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites understood and dealt with them by building institutions and enacting policies that ultimately shaped citizens' quality of life. But capitalism and democracy have not stood still. During the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democracies has undergone profound changes, linked most importantly to sweeping deindustrialization, accelerated tertiarization of the employment structure, and demographic developments. These changes have been accelerated and accentuated by the Great Recession, but their implications for the politics, policy strategies, and outcomes across advanced capitalist democracies can only be understood in a longer time horizon, which is the perspective we have adopted in this volume. Along the way, the analytical toolkit to understand these changes has gained in sophistication, complexity, and precision since the earlier volumes on which we build. New realities ask for new analytical tools and a periodic revision of the basic framework to understand cross-national differences and changes over time.

The present volume sets out to analyze the dynamics of contemporary advanced capitalism in the footsteps of the two earlier volumes. Our goal as editors has been to provide a synthetic view allowing the reader to grasp the nature of the current transformations. The volume is guided by a heuristic framework that takes as its point of departure the context of the structural transformations and proceeds to the politics of change, which, in turn, account for the governments' policy outputs and, ultimately, lead to outcomes that, on their part, contribute to the transformation of society.

In the concluding chapter of the 1999 volume Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, the then-editors affirmed that the most challenging part of the characterization of contemporary capitalism is to determine “how the cross-sectional patterns of variation, locked in through intricate pathways of industrialization and democratization, are shaped by growing global interdependence and domestic political and socioeconomic change” (Kitschelt et al. 1999: 427). Today, almost two decades later, the task at hand seems even more daunting, as advanced capitalism is caught up in an accelerating flux, induced by both external constraints as well as the internal dynamics of its political forces and institutional reforms.

In a process accelerated by the Great Recession, virtually every essential aspect of advanced political economies is undergoing fundamental, and potentially far-reaching, transformations. From the demographic tenets of society, through partisan loyalties or the organization of labor markets and economic institutions, to education, tax, and social protection systems, everything seems to be in a process of fundamental change and in need of either adaptation or radical reform. The cross-national variation in institutional arrangements seems to have shifted from frozen landscapes to a complex, hybrid, and morphing configuration of elements taken from different places and “models.” What were previously understood as stable and rather self-contained “models” of economic growth, distribution, and risk management are now giving way to unprecedented combinations across such models with unanticipated consequences for economic performance as much as individual citizens' life chances.

A full understanding of these processes requires revisiting existing accounts of the cross-national variation among advanced political economies. While the current reconfiguration may no longer conform to any of the models highlighted in the previous literature on the post–World War II past of today's most affluent democracies, and while current developments may even make us reconsider how these models need to be characterized in the first place, the stream of new evidence does not, however, warrant the conclusion that current transformations are either random or a signal of convergence on a single institutional equilibrium.

We began this project spurred by our skepticism of diagnostics proclaiming the convergence in terms of outcomes and policy among advanced industrial societies, a view only invigorated by the financial crisis that began in the fall of 2007. In this interpretation, the crisis operates as the catalyst of a long-expected return of capitalism to its pre-1945 normalcy, marred by extremely slow improvements of people's quality of life and by a structural determinism asserting the power of capital and sweeping away the importance of institutional differences (cf. Schäfer and Streeck 2013; Streeck 2014). In this process, the key mechanisms at work are global trade openness, labor migration to rich countries, and especially the free and speculative movement of capital. Jointly, they unravel preexisting industrial relations systems and exert downward pressures on wages and standards of living. The decline in aggregate demand, in turn, contributes to slowing economic growth, rising long-term unemployment, and a dualization of labor markets with a rapidly eroding core of protected insiders. This process coincides with an increasing concentration of wealth and incomes at the individual and household levels, reinforced by a switch to less progressive forms of taxation (Piketty 2014). Faced with this specter, electoral elites engage in a defensive insulation (“cartelization”), trying to shelter themselves from populist challengers who call upon the incumbents to listen to the citizens' grievances. The breakdown of political representation, in turn, fuels popular dissatisfaction and cynicism with democracy and partisan competition, an erosion of public trust and civic-mindedness, as well as a decline of political participation in all of its expressions.

Our volume has challenged the claim that there is increasing uniformity and convergence in the processes, outputs, and outcomes of politics in postindustrial capitalist democracies. There is a continuous stream of challenges originating from the realms of demographics, technology (and related patterns of consumption), and the global system of production and finance.