The 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 pres