Unfulfilled Electoral Potential of West European Liberal Parties

For all their long histories, liberal parties win relatively little popular support in most of Western Europe. This book, however, highlights an influx of voters combining economically free-market and culturally cosmopolitan ('market cosmopolitan') policy preferences, and argues that liberal parties are uniquely well positioned to appeal to these voters, offering the potential for a sizeable increase in their electoral support. Combining voter- and expert-level data, Davenport shows that in ideological terms alone, the majority of liberal parties, termed 'social liberals', occupy more promising positions than any other group of parties due to their proximity to these market cosmopolitan voters.

In practice, however, social liberals only win the support of a small proportion of these market cosmopolitans, who instead tend to vote for either conservative or social democratic parties. The fact that these voters overlook social liberals in favour of such ideologically diverse alternatives presents a clear puzzle which appears to run counter the accepted wisdom that voters support parties that best represent their own ideological positions. Having set out this puzzle, the book then moves on to set out a twofold explanation for it, highlighting both social liberals' negative non-ideological reputations and market cosmopolitans' pre-existing partisan loyalties. It concludes by noting that these voters retain the potential to reshape electoral politics in Western Europe, even if this potential has been as yet unfulfilled.