This article provides a longitudinal study of political polarisation of climate-policy-relevant attitudes in Britain, 2014-2025. It shows that, in a context of increased climate salience, Britons' climate-policy-relevant attitudes have become much more strongly associated with party support (partisan polarisation) and with other political attitudes (ideological polarisation). Consistent with findings from other West European countries, partisan polarisation is driven particularly by the growing number and increasing attitudinal distinctiveness of right-populist party supporters, while ideological polarisation occurs mainly along the cultural dimension. The article assesses individual-level polarisation mechanisms using cross-lagged panel models. Results suggest that, notwithstanding temporal fluctuation in estimated effects, both party-based attitude change and attitude-based sorting contribute to partisan polarisation. However, additional analysis suggests that ideology-based attitude change - whereby climate-policy-relevant attitudes and right-populist support both align increasingly with voters' prior cultural attitudes - contributes substantially to both cultural ideological polarisation and partisan polarisation of climate-policy-relevant attitudes.
While immigration and redistribution issues have increasingly converged at the elite level in Western Europe, they remain less correlated among voters, leading to significant elite-voter incongruence. This article argues that this incongruence is not static but temporal, rooted in political socialisation. Because earlier cohorts were socialised in an era when the immigration issue was less salient, even among elites, their preferences are less constrained by the current configuration of political competition. An Age-Period-Cohort analysis of data from 16 Western European countries demonstrates that the positive association between pro-redistribution and pro-immigration attitudes is weaker among earlier cohorts. This contrasts with newer cohorts, for whom both stances increasingly form a coherent left-right identity, mirroring the elite shift. The incongruence is therefore driven by earlier cohorts (e.g. 'Left Authoritarians') who maintain partisanship towards parties that are not fully aligned with their preferences, and it is expected to narrow through generational replacement.
There is a growing consensus in party politics that new fault lines are emerging, and scholars increasingly characterise competition as multidimensional. In a multidimensional space, parties can adopt varied positions, combining left/progressive stances on some issues with right/conservative ones on others. Earlier work found that parties combining such positions - what this article refers to as ideological inconsistency - receive less support than ideologically consistent parties. Yet insights are lacking into why inconsistent parties receive lower support. To address this, this article uses original surveys in ten countries, asking respondents and experts to position parties on economic, social, and cultural issues. Results show that citizens are somewhat less informed about the positions of inconsistent parties. The article also finds that when citizens perceive a party as more inconsistent, they like it less. This effect is not explained by proximity considerations or party type, suggesting a general distaste for ideological inconsistency.
This article examines the conditional importance of structural power in determining firms' political influence. While structural power derived from firms' economic size has been widely theorised as a key determinant of business influence, it is argued here that its effect is highly conditional, because it may be dampened by organisational, sector-level and institutional factors. Drawing on a unique survey of major firms in Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands, this article analyses corporate influence across parliamentary and bureaucratic venues. The findings show that structural power is most effective when it is activated by insider lobbying. Moreover, strong variation is found across countries in terms of how important structural power is to gain more influence. These results contribute to debates on corporate political activity by demonstrating that structural power is not automatic but depends on firms' ability to strategically deploy their political resources through active lobbying. These findings have implications for theories of business power and the study of corporate influence in different institutional and sectoral settings.
