This book can be read in two ways. First, to the extent that students of international political economy (IPE) do not consider globalization's effects beyond government policies, it can be read as one of the first systematic attempts to examine the relationship between globalization and politics. Second, to the extent that students of political parties have failed to consider how party systems might be reshaped by globalization, it rates as a first attempt to do so.

The chief task of West European Politics in the Age of Globalization is to trace out the influence of “globalization” on mass preferences, party strategies, and ultimately, system change. In the course of their analysis, the authors make several claims. They maintain that over the course of the 1970s through the early 2000s party systems have become both more fragmented and more polarized. Key to the argument is that this increased ideological divergence is triangular, anchored by parties of the Left, the moderate Right, and the new populist Right in two-dimensional policy space (one dimension is economic, the other cultural). At its heart, the story echoes the now-classic analysis of Stein Rokkan—change originates from new cleavages arising outside of the national political process by newfound “winners” and “losers” from globalization. This new divide can alter the basis of the cultural dimension of political competition in terms of a “demarcation-integration” conflict. But the likelihood that these new divides—which are observed in six countries (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK)—give way to mobilization and all-out transformation turns out to be dependent on two non-Rokkanean factors: institutions and the party strategies.

The book is organized in three parts. Part I sketches the new winners–losers divide, discusses how it can redefine political competition, lays out the theoretical expectations, and describes the empirical approach. The empirical efforts are impressive. Half the data for the book—the “demand side” contributing to new alignments—come from nationally representative sample surveys. The other half—the “supply side”—employs original data produced from content analyses of print media during national election campaigns. All told, information is collected in each country for about four elections—one during the 1970s to provide bases for comparison and three from the 1990s through early 2000s to examine the era of denationalization and globalization.

Part II is composed of six country chapters. Each proceeds in three steps. The first involves factor analyses of survey data. Regardless of country or era, these analyses, without fail, reveal two (not one, not three) distinct dimensions of conflict, a point the authors make repeatedly. Indeed, if there were any who thought it appropriate to reduce party space onto a single left–right dimension, this book provides solid evidence to the contrary. The second step of the empirical analysis involves the two-dimensional placement of party voters and sociodemographic groups in a common space using weighted-metric multidimensional scaling. Lastly, the process is repeated for the supply-side measures. By locating supporters, groups, and parties for different elections, the authors are able to illustrate the extent to which political space has changed from the 1970s to the turn of the twenty-first century.

Part II at times get bogged down in minutiae, and at times country narratives seem unrelated to the data analyses. Part III, however, synthesizes results in comparative perspective, and here the study's broader themes come out vividly. In Chapter 10, for example, Romain Lachat and Martin Dolezal show that distances among different social divides have changed over time. They demonstrate that the influence of religion and class for shaping policy space have subsided, while education- and skills-based conflicts have become more important, particularly for cultural issues. The increased salience of culture is illuminated again in Chapter 11 on supply-side comparisons. Where 1970s parties were aligned “horizontally” in terms of the economy, 1990s divisions are clearly more “vertical,” cast in terms of cultural issues.

A book as wide-ranging as this provides many opportunities for questioning the claims of Hanspeter Kriese and his colleagues. The heterodox theoretical framework renders it difficult to evaluate just which of the many causal factors matters the most. As the authors acknowledge, many of the causal factors introduced fail to explain cross-national variation in party system transformation in the ways expected. The most convincing account traces system change not to cleavages or institutions but to the actions of mainstream parties in fending off new challengers. But alongside many other factors considered, their arguments about strategies are less compelling than those of Herbert Kitschelt (1994) or, more recently, of Bonnie Meguid (2008). Support for other claims also occasionally come off as indeterminate. The demarcation-integration conflict, for example, is said not to add to but replace old meanings of the cultural dimension—an important proposition. This claim is supported by assessing factor loadings and examining output from the multidimensional scaling. While useful for distilling vast amounts of information, these techniques are not useful for testing hypotheses with great precision. Lastly, IPE scholars might be disappointed by the volume's failure to test certain relationships lying at the beginning of the causal chain. How important is, say, exposure to capital flows for party system alignments relative to its importance for, say, the convergence of corporate tax policies?

All told, however, the authors should be applauded for writing a highly engaging, comprehensive account on an important topic. In the 1980s, books such as Russell Dalton et al. (1984) examined the extent to which value change in industrial society had reshaped party alignments. In the 1990s, Kitschelt (1994) highlighted the role of party strategies in facilitating (or stymieing) electoral change in the face of changing economic environments. Kriesi et al. now join these and other voices with what might be the definitive account of party system transformation for the twenty-first century.