Current Issues in Voting Behaviours at Mass Elections

This section will examine current issues in Voting Behaviour at Mass Elections. These issues include how voters apportion credit and blame for governmental performance, the impact of leaders and candidates on the vote, the inter-relationships between decisions in different contexts (such as local, national and European), the decline of party and cleavages, the nationalisation (or localisation) or electoral politics, and the importance of the media. While many of these topics have frequently been the subject of analysis ever since modern electoral research got under way, most research to date has been country specific. In this section we propose to focus on research that is explicitly comparative both in its empirical scope and in its theoretical focus. In so doing, we propose to bring together two traditions of electoral behaviour research and provide an opportunity to evaluate their relative strengths and weaknesses. Until recently, the study of voting behaviour has focused primarily on individual level explanations. This has its roots most obviously in the survey traditions of the Michigan school: Campbell et al’s The Voter Decides and The American Voter and Butler and Stokes’ Political Change in Britain. Thus the growth of electoral volatility or the decline in electoral participation has widely been accounted for by a decline in the strength of voters’ attachments to political parties. However, more recently there has been a renewed interest in the impact of political institutions – political parties, electoral systems and governmental systems – on now people vote. This might be seen to owe something to the earlier Columbia school of electoral research which stressed social context but it is different in that it focuses more on political context. The insight of such studies is that whether and how much some factors matter to the vote depends on the wider institutional context. Thus, for example, retrospective evaluations of past performance may matter more in countries with single party governments where it is easier to attribute credit and blame, or where alternative options are more attractive. This growing interest in institutional explanations has, of course, in part been stimulated by the opportunities for comparative research opened up by the democratisation of Central and Eastern Europe and in part by the ‘new institutionalism’ underpinned by rational choice approaches to political science. They can certainly only be tested within a comparative framework. This section will therefore essentially address the contrast between individual and institutionally based explanations of electoral behaviour. The panels will comprise some that focus on individual level explanations, some that focus on institutional ones, but we aim to prioritise those that bring the two sets of theories together. An obvious example is turnout, a subject of recent growing interest given declining levels of participation in many mature democracies. Some studies, particularly nationally focussed ones, examine individual level explanations only, seeing turnout decline as stemming from changing norms and declining partisan or social attachments. Another set of studies, typically comparative ones, tend to emphasise the institutional context of elections: the electoral system, the ideological gap between parties, the day of the week on which voting takes place. Yet these two types of explanation can be combined, and contrasted by for example suggesting that the impact of individual level norms varies according to the institutional context. We hope paper givers will take the opportunity to undertake this kind of synthesis. We welcome expressions of interest by those willing to act as chairs, and especially so from younger scholars. We are also currently approaching individuals to act as chairs. Chairs are expected to be proactive in seeking out papers for their panels. We welcome offers of papers. Priority will be given in all panels to papers that contain comparative analysis.