Abstract
Research problem: In the last decade, there has been a dynamic shift in politics in many European countries. There have been many new political parties and movements that emphasize new issues.
It seems that traditional ideological divides are losing importance in the European context. It is, therefore, a question of whether the current European political debate has a clear ideological dividing line and whether this ideological line is different for the voters of the traditional and new political parties.
This paper is based on the Boutyline & Vaisey (2017) study, which convincingly shows that the main political dividing line in the United States is the ideological identification of the voters within the conservatism - liberalism dichotomy. They came to this conclusion through the Belief Network Analysis (BNA), which examines the network structure of the attitudinal variables correlations and defines the core beliefs in the opinion structure.
Data and Methodology: In our study we use data from the European Social Survey Round 8 (2016), which was conducted in 23 countries (N = 44,387). Our analysis includes dozens of political and social attitudes to cover the widest range of political beliefs and issues.
Objectives and results: Our study addresses two questions: (1) whether there is a single divisional ideology in the structure of attitudes across Europe and what attitudes are central in this structure; (2) whether different dividing attitudes can be observed among the voters of the traditional and new political parties. The preliminary results suggest that there is no single ideological dividing line across Europe and no clear ideological issue.
The left-right ideological divide lies entirely outside the core of the network of attitudes. The attitudes towards migration are the most distinctive.