Political Parties And Electoral Change

How have Europe′s mainstream political parties responded to the long-term decline in voter loyalties? What are the consequences of this change in the electoral markets in which parties now operate? Popular disengagement, disaffection, and withdrawal on the one hand, and increasing popular support for protest parties on the other, have become the hallmarks of modern European politics. This book provides an excellent account of how political parties in Western Europe are perceiving and are responding to these contemporary challenges of electoral dealignment. Each chapter employs a common format to present and compare the changing strategies of established parties and party systems in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Ireland. The result is an invaluable portrait of the changing electoral environment and how parties are interacting with each another and voters today. Political Parties and Electoral Change is essential reading for anybody seeking a deeper understanding of contemporary electoral politics and of the challenges facing west European party systems. Peter Mair is Professor of Comparative Politics at Leiden University. Wolfgang C. M ller is Professor of Political Science at the University of Mannheim and previously taught at the University of Vienna. Fritz Plasser is Professor of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck.

Until the last quarter of the 20th Century, Western party systems appeared to be frozen and stability was generally taken to be the central characteristic of individual-level party choice. But during the 1970s and 1980s, in a spasm of change that appeared to occur in all countries, this ceased to be true. Voters in Western countries suddenly demonstrated an unexpected and increasing unpredictability in their choices between parties, often to the extent of voting for parties that are quite new to the political scene. Understanding these fundamental changes became a pressing concern for political scientists and commentators alike, and a matter of extensive controversy and debate. In the middle 1980s, an international team of leading scholars set out to explore the reasons for these shifts in voting patterns in sixteen western countries: all those of the (then) European Community (except for Luxembourg and Portugal), together with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United States. In this book they report their findings regarding the connections between social divisions and party choice, and the manner in which these links had changed since the mid-1960s. The authors based their country studies on a common research design. By doing so, they were able to focus on the characteristics that the sixteen countries had in common so as to evaluate the extent to which the changes had a common source. This is a longitudinal study, extending over nearly a generation, of changes in voting behaviour that is as fully cross-national as it was possible to produce at the time. Its findings enabled the authors to break away from conventional explanations for electoral change to arrive at conclusions of far-reaching importance. The passage of time has not dated this book, and in this edition the original text is augmented by a new Preface that describes the ways in which the book's findings retain their relevance for contemporary scholarship, and by an Epilogue in which the main analyses reported in the book are brought up to date to the middle 2000s.

The field of elections and electoral systems, and particularly electoral reform, has exhibited tremendous growth and cross-national appeal over the last two decades. However, beyond an increased knowledge of voting rules and their consequences for political representation, little attention has been devoted to the question of why electoral systems have recently undergone substantial change in several liberal democracies. This book addresses several new approaches to electoral reform. First, the scope of the study of electoral reform has been expanded. Second, contrary to previous studies of electoral reform, the conviction that the determinants of reform can be explained by one single approach has been replaced by a belief in a more comprehensive framework for analysis. Third, we move beyond political parties (acting in parliament and government) as the most significant source of electoral reform. Fourth, a focus on the determinants of electoral reform allows us to include motivations and objectives of electoral reform. A final advancement in the study of electoral reform is the inclusion of countries other than ‘established’ democracies. This book was published as a special issue of West European Politics.

In this study of the breakdown of traditional party loyalties and voting patterns, prominent comparativists and country specialists examine the changes now occurring in the political systems of advanced industrial democracies. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Using an innovative framework for the study of voting behavior in parliamentary democracies, this book sheds new light on the ongoing personalization of politics. The analysis makes use of national election study data from Britain, Germany and The Netherlands and shows that party leaders can often be the difference between victory and defeat.