The Impact Of Cleavages On Swiss Voting Behaviour

This book studies the impact of cleavages on electoral choices. Based on a case study of Switzerland, it analyses how cleavages divide voters into voting blocs and how this influences Swiss voting behaviour and the Swiss party system. The first part examines the development of salient cleavages such as religion, social class, rural-urban, and language between 1971 and 2011. Behavioural changes among voters and changes in the size of social groups are explored as explanatory factors for the decline of cleavage voting. The second part proposes a contextual perspective analysis of the current impact of cleavages using both individual and contextual factors. These factors are also combined to examine interaction effects between the individual and the context. Finally, the third part analyses whether the impact of cleavages has harmonised across different contexts (Swiss cantons) over time.

Political Choice Matters investigates the extent to which class and religion influence party choice in contemporary democracies. Rather than the commonly-assumed process in which a weakening of social boundaries leads to declining social divisions in political preferences, this book's primary message is that the supply of choices by parties influences the extent of such divisions: hence, political choice matters. Combining overtime, cross-national data, and multi-level research designs the authors show how policy and programmatic positions adopted by parties provide voters with choice sets that accentuate or diminish the strength of political cleavages. The book gives central place to the positions of political parties on left-right, economically redistributive and morally conservative versus social liberal dimensions. Evidence on these positions is obtained primarily from the Comparative Manifesto Project, with a chapter dedicated to elaborating and validating the various implementations of this uniquely valuable source of evidence on party positions. The primary empirical focus includes case studies of 11 Western, Southern, and Central European societies as well as 'anglo-democracies' including Britain, USA, Canada, and Australia. These detailed analyses of election studies ranging in some cases from the post-war period until the early part of the 21st century are augmented by a pooled cross-national and overtime analysis of 15 Western democracies using a unique, combined dataset of 188 national surveys. The authors show that although there has been some overtime decline in the strength of association between social class and party choice, this is far smaller than the amount of change in the relationship occurring as a result of party movements on questions of inequality and redistribution. The strength of the religiosity cleavage is also influenced by changes in party positions on moral issues - changes that can be understood as a strategic response to a process of secularization that has weakened the electoral viability of parties deriving support from appeals to religious values.

The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since WWII. Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies. The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between votersÕ political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump. Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Mart’nez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.

This book offers a systematic exploration of the role of religion and religiosity in electoral politics in Catholic, Protestant, and religiously mixed countries across Western Europe and in the United States. The chapters approach the relationship between religion, religiosity, and electoral behaviour from a variety of different angles. They include analyses of secularization trends; comparative studies of the links between vote choice and religiosity; longitudinal single country studies; and a novel discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of the politicization of religion that provides a radically new framework for the analysis of the role of religiosity in election studies. The volume shows that despite the expectations of secularization theory, religiosity remains relevant when casting votes. It also argues that the traditional notion of religious cleavage should be replaced with the more accurate idea of religious voting. Chapters draw on National Election Studies data and comparative datasets such as European Values Studies (EVS), European Social Surveys (ESS), and European Election Studies (EES) to empirically test expectations regarding religious voting. The results show that variations in religious voting are conditional on both the agency of political and ecclesiastical leaders when politicizing religious issues and the legacies of previous societal and political religious conflicts, regardless of whether the original party system had a predominant religious cleavage.

From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ?electoral engineering?. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. The study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contracting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define electoral incentives facing parties, politicians and citizens. By changing these rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior.

This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the many different facets of the Swiss political system and of the major developments in modern Swiss politics. It brings together a diverse set of more than 50 leading experts in their respective areas, who explore Switzerland's distinctive and sometimes intriguing politics at all levels and across multiple themes. In placing the topics in an international and comparative context and in conversation with the broader scholarly literature, the contributors provide a much-needed counterpoint to the rather idealized and sometimes outdated perception of Swiss politics. The work is divided into thematic sections that represent the inherent diversity of the Swiss political sphere: following a detailed introduction from the editors, the parts of the volume explore foundations, institutions, cantons and municipalities, actors, elections and votes, decision-making processes, and public policies, with a three-chapter epilogue. Throughout, The Oxford Handbook of Swiss Politics presents new arguments, insights, and data, and offers analyses relevant not only to political science but also to international relations, European studies, history, sociology, law, and economics.

This open access book carefully explores the relationship between social democracy and its working-class electorate in Western Europe. Relying on different indicators, it demonstrates an important transformation in the class basis of social democracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the working-class vote is strongly fragmented and social democratic parties face competition on multiple fronts for their core electorate – and not only from radical right parties. Starting from a reflection on ‘working-class parties’ and using a sophisticated class schema, the book paints a nuanced and diversified picture of the trajectory of social democracy that goes beyond a simple shift from working-class to middle-class parties. Following a detailed description, the book reviews possible explanations of workers' new voting patterns and emphasizes the crucial changes in parties' ideologies. It closes with a discussion on the role of the working class in social democracy's future electoral strategies.