Representative democracy in Europe depends on the capacity of parties to offer political alternatives, integrate the demands of voters into their platforms and responsibly translate them into policies when elected into office. Elections, thus, are the key element in the representative model that offer voters the chance to both articulate by whom they would like to be represented and to hold elected officials accountable via the threat to revoke this authorization (Pitkin, 1967). In recent decades, this model of representative democracy has come under substantial pressure. Long-term processes of social change related to cultural liberalism and globalization have transformed the policy concerns of the electorate (Kriesi, 2016). The established parties previously engaged in representing the interests of a majority of citizens along the traditional left-right dimension of political conflict, however, had difficulties to respond to these changing demands of voters. Since the 2000s, established parties found themselves increasingly challenged by new political actors including populist radical right and radical left parties, Green parties, and “valence populist” parties (Zulianello, 2020) in Eastern Europe. The rise of these new challenger parties, is not only an expression of the declining representative capacity of mainstream parties. It is also intrinsically connected to the different economic and political crises that Europe has been witnessing over the last 20 years (Kriesi and Pappas, 2015; Hutter and Kriesi, 2019). The new political actors across Europe have in common that they call into question the sustained capability of mainstream parties to represent the interests and preferences of European citizens. While mainstream parties mostly emphasize issues related to the economic dimension of political conflict, challenger parties tend to run on political platforms that emphasize issues related to the policy challenges arising from an increasingly globalized world and interconnected European Union. In doing so, some of the challenger parties also adopt a decisively anti-system or populist strategy of appealing to voters (Hopkin, 2020). This chapter examines how political representation and accountability across Europe has been affected by the changes that European party systems have been witnessing over the last decades. It sheds light on the drivers of these changes and the resulting implications for the representation of citizens’ political preferences. The chapter has six sections. The first discusses the most important long-term processes of social change that have shaped European societies and politics over the past decades. The next four sections show how these processes found their reflection in transforming political space in Europe. Not only did they contribute to the electoral decline of mainstream parties who previously used to represent the interests of a large majority of the electorate along the traditional left-right dimension of political conflict. Coupled with the consequences of multi-level competition in the European Union, they also gave rise to the success of new challenger parties. These challenger parties represent both the new substantive demands of citizens that map on a new, cultural cleavage of political competition. Many of them also articulate voters’ political distrust towards the mainstream political elite. Finally, this chapter shows that challenger parties across Europe have increasingly participated in government, allowing them to represent voters’ new demands in cabinet
