Electoral Outcomes and Party Strategies in Western Europe 1988-2025

This dataset supports research on the electoral consequences of mainstream party accommodation strategies toward niche parties, focusing on the issue of European integration. It examines election outcomes and dyadic vote switching across 14 Western European countries from 1988 to 2025. The data is used to test propositions regarding intra-party divisions and voter flows.

Use Cases

• Analyze dyadic vote switching patterns between mainstream and Eurosceptic parties to assess the impact of accommodative strategies.
• Examine election outcomes across 14 Western European countries to correlate intra-party divisions with electoral punishment.
• Model voter flows to test the valence logic where divided accommodators lose voters to non-Eurosceptic rivals.
• Investigate the relationship between party strategies on European integration and electoral success over the 1988-2025 period.

Strengths

• Data spans a 37-year time range from 1988 to 2025, providing longitudinal analysis potential.
• Covers election outcomes and voter behavior across 14 Western European countries for comparative study.
• Focuses on a specific, politically salient niche issue: European integration.

Limitations

• The specific data structure, column names, and row count are unknown, limiting immediate analytical utility.
• Potential geographic bias as the data is limited to Western European countries.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse, authored by Felix Lehmann.

Collection Method

Data compiled for academic research on party competition and voting behavior.

Time Range

1988 to 2025

Freshness

Dataset was last updated on 2026-02-19.

Geography

14 Western European countries