Commentary: The Cultural Determinants of Party System Change

The purpose of this commentary piece is to uncover some of the key the cultural determinants of party systems change. Our basic claim is that the 1960s witnessed what we call the rise of the fluid self, of an individual who had complex, conflicting, and inconsistent preferences. We ground the pervasiveness of fluidity in this notion of the individual in key elements of popular culture (theater, popular music, Western film characters etc.) to show that cultural expressions reflect, but also shape, the culture of a society and transformation in its party system and public policy. We then link this to the crisis of parties, understood in diverse ways, that has faced European party systems and the success of their conocomitant electoral policy offers for deca-des. We advance three related claims: first, that the rise of the fluid self created a conflict between structures and the individual; second, that this conflict made the previous/existing structures obsolete; and, third, that the obsolescence of such structures led to the unfreezing of Western European party systems and higher levels of party system fluidity, both of which have a bearing on policy making and policy studies.