The European Voter: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies
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Book Review The European Voter: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies Jacques Thomassen Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, 384pp. ISBN: 0-19-927321-9. Acta Politica (2007) 42, 98–102. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500174
The European Voter stems from a collaboration among many of the book’s authors to create a European National Elections Database that would serve the social science community by placing all European national election data in one repository and by creating codebooks in English. The ultimate goal of the project initially was to make it possible for scholars to conduct cross-national research into electoral behaviour — an activity that was previously extraordinarily difficult for most elections scholars, in great part because of linguistic barriers. As they were creating the national elections database, The European Voter’s collaborators came to realize that they had a potentially important contribution to make in terms of analyzing these election studies themselves. This review summarizes the key arguments and findings from this contribution. The main theoretical arguments driving the analyses presented in each of the book’s chapters are outlined in the Introduction by Thomassen. These theoretical approaches are based on the literature related to the effects of modernization and political context/political institutions on voting behaviour. The former stems from arguments put forth by scholars such as Ronald Inglehart and Russell Dalton, which point to a fundamental change in democratic citizens in developed democracies and thus a fundamental shift in the way politics in such democracies work because of factors like increased education and access to information. According to these arguments, modernization has produced a weakening of the traditional bases of elections, such as social groupings and ‘old-politics’ values. Thomassen and the authors of individual chapters outline the empirical implications of such arguments: that turnout for elections should be declining (as modern democratic citizens turn to alternative methods of influence); that vote choices themselves should be based less on traditional social cleavages — particularly class and religion — and increasingly in ‘new politics’ issues; that voting should also be increasingly a function of issues and retrospective economic evaluations rather than social groupings or hard and fast attachment to parties; and that evaluations of party leaders ought to play a larger role in electoral decisions in the modern day. That is, as modern citizens no longer need to rely upon social position and
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psychological attachment to parties (presumably inherited from their parents), they are likely to turn to other factors in making vote choices instead. In essence, this part of the argument and analysis revisits and expands upon Mark Franklin et al.’s work in Electoral Change (1992). At the same time, however — and this appears to be the key contribution of the volume — the authors wish to incorporate newer arguments about the role of politics
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