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The Berelson paradox recognizes that, in democracies, the aggregate requirement for adaptability is provided by the least qualified voters, ie, volatile voters tend to be less knowledgeable & less involved in politics. Here, analysis of data from 10 (1952-1988) US & 7 Swedish (1968-1988) national election studies reveals that while the interaction between voting intention & behavior is similar in both countries, the effect of interest & knowledge on this relationship is not: in Sweden, intention-behavior changers were not likely to be low in interest or knowledge, & interested nonpartisans were overrepresented among the intention-behavior changers. 10 Tables, 27 References. Adapted from the source document.

Election study panelsfrom Sweden (1979-1982) and the U.S. (1972-1976 and 1956-1960) were analyzed to see whether prior behavior (as implied by behaviorism) or recalled behavior (as implied by field theory) would better predict subsequent voting behavior. Although the results were mixed, data from each panel tended to support field theory somewhat more than behaviorism.

Three models are used to analyze survey data from pre-election interviews preceding Sweden's Mar 1980 referendum on nuclear power. The rational democratic model is supported in the robust relationship between preference & behavior. A significant amount of wishful thinking occurred. No solid evidence of a bandwagon effect is observed. The link between the short- & long-term expectations is stronger among active than among nonactive people. 3 Tables, 1 Figure, 29 References. HA

Cross-cultural survey research rests upon the assumption that if survey features are kept constant, data will remain comparable across languages, cultures and countries. Yet translating concepts across languages, cultures and political contexts is complicated by linguistic, cultural, normative or institutional discrepancies. Such discrepancies are particularly relevant for complex political concepts such as democracy, where the literature on political support has revealed significant cross-cultural differences in people's attitudes toward democracy. Recognizing that language, culture and other socio-political variables affect survey results has often been equated with giving up on comparative research and many survey researchers have consequently chosen to simply ignore the issue of comparability and measurement equivalence across languages, cultures and countries. This paper contributes to the debate, using a distributional semantic lexicon, which is a statistical model measuring co-occurrence statistics in large text data. The method is motivated by structuralist meaning theory, stating that words with similar meanings tend to occur in similar contexts, and that contexts shape and define the meanings of words. Compared to other methodological approaches aimed at identifying and measuring cross-cultural discrepancies, this approach enables us to systematically analyze how the concept of democracy is used in its natural habitat. Collecting geo-tagged language data from news and social online source documents this paper descriptively explores varieties in meanings of democracy across a substantial number of languages and countries, and maps ways in which democracy is used among online populations and regions worldwide.

Parliaments are—or should at least be—the central rule‐making institutions in democratic countries. If people do not have faith in the institution making the rules, it is less likely that people live by them. Consequently, it is beneficiary if trust in parliament is high. But it is also a normative good in itself. If the people do not trust the key institution whereby they can exercise "rule by the people over itself," democracy itself is endangered. Secondly, trust levels should be reasonably even spread among relevant social and political groups in a society because parliament should ideally be a nonpartisan level playing field. However, because the majority in parliament typically chooses and sustains the acting government, one could say that legislatures in parliamentary democracies should not be level playing fields. According to this argument, there should be differences in trust in parliament between groups of individuals with varying political affiliations. Supporters of the majority in parliament should be expected to have higher trust in the legislature compared to citizens who voted for the opposition.We test our three hypotheses on data from some 80 countries participating in World Value Survey, either in Waves 5 or 6. We find that people in both new and established democracies harbor lower levels of trust than an intuitive interpretation of normative theory would lead us to expect. We also find that the attitudes of tens of thousands of citizens garnered from across 42 new and old democracies suggest that levels of average trust in groups of these societies are not as equally distributed, as a simple reading of democratic theory would have us to believe. In particular, individuals with a stronger interest in politics, and who are winners by the account of the last election, have statistically substantively relevant higher average levels of trust in parliament as an institution than do other citizens. The latter seems to us especially potentially problematic in particular for some of the new democracies where majority‐dominant parties manage to cling on to power over several election cycles. If what we find here were generally applicable also over several election cycles, we would expect the gap between winners and losers to widen and sediment and potentially sow the seeds of anti‐system movements opposed to democracy. Parliament is obviously a partisan creature in the eyes of most citizens in democracies. The level playing field idea does not fly.

Although the phenomenon of dissatisfied democrats has been frequently discussed in the literature, it has not often been empirically investigated. This article sets out to analyse the discrepancy between the strong support for democratic principles and the widespread discontent with the way democracy works. Drawing on earlier research on the sources of political support, using data from a wide range of democracies, the relevance of two contrasting explanatory perspectives are investigated. The first perspective argues that the sources of democratic discontent are found on the input-side of the political system in terms of representation. The contrasting view argues that the output-side of the political system is most important, where the quality of government plays the pivotal role. The results of the empirical analysis suggest that, in general, both types of factor are important, but also that these processes to a large extent are conditioned by the level of institutional consolidation. Adapted from the source document.

"This book uses Sweden as a test case to analyze how parliament and elected representatives function in a representative democracy. Despite the status of Scandinavian countries as perhaps the world's most egalitarian societies, the book argues that the best summary characterization of Swedish representative democracy is an elitist system run from above. The book also argues that an individualist representational model is relevant to the Swedish setting and most likely, to other settings as well. Representative democracy is not just party-based democracy - not even in a country with strong and disciplined parties. The book takes a broad approach to the study of political representation. It integrates into a single analytical framework concepts and theories from neighbouring traditions such as legislative behaviour, opinion formation and interest organizations. The study is based on a comprehensive set of data, including three surveys of the Members of the Swedish Parliament, corresponding voter surveys and content analysis of mass media and parliamentary records."--Provided by publisher.