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The concept party identification lies at the heart of much research on political preferences and behavior in established democracies. Drawing on data obtained from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-99) and the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (1984-1998), we offer a fresh approach to the concept. Party identification is a stance that people take towards the political parties. They apply a consistent rule -a decision heuristic -persistently returning to the same preference year after year or behaving haphazardly, moving with no clear pattern among the choices. Most take a definitively negative stance towards one of the parties and a positive stance towards the other major party. Of these, about half display behavior that reflects a psychological commitment and about half are as likely as not to pick that party when asked. For most people, party identification is neither a loyalty, as conceived by traditional understanding associated with the Michigan -nor a calculated choice -as offered by rational choice theory -but a way to situate oneself persistently in relation to the relatively distant objects of politics.

The study of voting has been dominated by several major research traditions—social class and social structure, party identification, and rational choice—each of which has been subject to major criticism. In this article, we develop an alternative approach to the study of electoral behavior. We view vote choice as a decisional process, and the assumptions of our model are in line with available knowledge of simple human decision making and with related theoretical approaches to the subject. In addition to accounting for vote choices in Britain in 1970 and 1974, our argument rests on relatively few and simple assumptions and provides hypotheses that account for stability and change in the votes cast by individuals and by the electorate taken as an aggregate. It also provides a proper theoretical and empirical understanding of the concept of party identification. The result is an alternative to more widely used explanations of electoral behavior.

Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure is a revised second edition of the volume that guided students and scholars through the intellectual demands of comparative politics. Retaining a focus on the field's research schools, it now pays parallel attention to the pragmatics of causal research. Mark Lichbach begins with a review of discovery, explanation and evidence and Alan Zuckerman argues for explanations with social mechanisms. Ira Katznelson, writing on structuralist analyses, Margaret Levi on rational choice theory, and Marc Ross on culturalist analyses, assess developments in the field's research schools. Subsequent chapters explore the relationship among the paradigms and current research: the state, culturalist themes and political economy, the international context of comparative politics, contentious politics, multi-level analyses, nested voters, endogenous institutions, welfare states, and ethnic politics. The volume offers a rigorous and exciting assessment of the past decade of scholarship in comparative politics

The authors resolve a theoretical puzzle that characterizes the political preferences of members of social groups by (a) demonstrating that political homogeneity is a variable to be explained, (b) detailing how political discussions and shared attachments to political parties strongly influence its probability and arguing that political uniformity requires reinforcement and negotiation, (c) noting that the relatively low levels of shared policy preferences and political values are hardly influenced by any of the explanatory variables offered, and (d) presenting an alternative set of principles that accounts for these sometimes coherent and sometimes incoherent patterns. Finally, the authors address general themes in political analysis: the formation of political cultures and the relationship between theory and evidence in political science, themes at the heart of Harry Eckstein's contributions to theory in political science.

This article examines a mode of political participation that frequently has been overlooked—individual efforts to obtain assistance from government officials. Using the seven-nation data set of Verba, Nie, and Kim, we develop and empirically evaluate alternatiave models of citizen contacting. Our first model draws on variations in the distribution of social and economic resources to explain the likelihood of contacting. The second focuses on differences in political ties to locate those most likely to contact government officials. We find greater support for the political ties model. Persons active in political parties and election campaigns are the most likely to engage in citizen contacting. Without political ties, few poor or uneducated persons would ask officials for assistance. We conclude by noting the more general theoretical and normative implications of our study.