Elections, Electoral Systems and Volatile Voters

ISBN: 9780230574489

出版年: 2009-1

页数: 248

定价: $ 107.35

内容简介

Elections and parties are obvious cornerstones of democratic regimes. Though intensively researched and lively debated through the post-war literature, these topics deserve continuous attention to keep up with an accelerating rate of change of both collective actors, legal rules, and their socio-political environment. The book gives a full account of past experience, present structures and processes, and probable developments, of the voters- party-electoral systems nexus in twenty-one advanced Western democracies. A special focus is devoted to volatility, i.e., the growing instability of voting choices. This -- is argued -- is the indicator of a wholesale crisis of the electors-parties trust relationship and the underlying cause of an unprecedented party fragmentation and a decreasing effectiveness of electoral rules. The analysis, descriptive, interpretative, and explanatory, is based on an original 1945-2007 comparative data set including all relevant political and institutional variables.