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The results of a simple over-time test of the changing salience of the incumbency
dimension are reported in Table 5.4. These make clear that there is no real support
for the third hypothesis. The proportion of incumbency volatility with respect to
total volatility varies substantially between countries and overtime, and reveals no
clear trend. Taking all countries together, the average salience peaks marginally in
the 1970s, and reaches its second highest level in the 1990s. In both decades, the
exchange of votes across the government-opposition divide adds to roughly half the
total exchange of votes in the systems as a whole. The figures are slightly lower – the
mid-40s – in the 1950s and 1960s, and substantially lower in the 1980s. Across the
individual countries, the distribution of values seems almost random. Norway and
Sweden peak in the 1950s; Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the UK
in the 1960s; Denmark, France and Germany in the 1970s; Finland and Iceland in
the 1980s; Italy and the Netherlands in the 1990s. In some polities, the salience of
the incumbency dimension is very high in a given decade, in others, and in the same
decade, it is very low. In other words, there appears to be a lot of noise and even
randomness in these data, and certainly no evidence of a trend towards the growing
relative importance of the government-opposition divide.
5.4 Conclusion
So what do we conclude from these brief and simple tests? First, we can conclude
that party competition in most systems in Europe has adapted in ways that allow
voters to make a clear choice between alternative governments. In ways that seemed
quite inconceivable in the 1960s, the modal form of competition in contemporary
Europe is now bipolar, thereby enhancing the role for accountability in electoral
processes. This is a major change. Second, and with almost no caveats at all, we
can conclude that governments are indeed becoming less popular, in that they are
losing steadily more and more support at the end of their terms in office. Third,
we can also conclude that the incumbency dimension is growing in importance, in
that most of the long-established democracies have recorded a steady growth in the
volume of votes traded across the government-opposition divide. However, fourth,
despite the growing importance of this divide, it is clear that it is not becoming
relatively more important, in that the exchange of votes in the system as a whole has
now grown to a level that effectively smothers the growth incumbency volatility as
such. The government-opposition dimension has certainly not declined in relative
importance, but is instead characterized by relatively trendless fluctuations.
In other words, governing is becoming more contentious in electoral terms, but
so also is everything else. The result is that even the government-opposition divide
fails to stand out as the key dimension of competition.
Is governIng becomIng more contentIous? / 85