Suchergebnisse

This volume examines the changing patterns of political participation over the past quarter of a century and the ways they have altered the relationship between citizens and their government. It documents the growing participation gap in contemporary democracies and proposes a variety of methods to narrow the gap

How do institutions and electoral systems matter for citizens' electoral choices? This study attempts to answer this question for contemporary democracies. The book assembles leading electoral researchers to examine citizen choice in over 30 democracies surveyed by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.

Familiarising the reader with particular aspects of political behaviour and the methodologies of study in this field, this volume examines the role of the citizen in contemporary politics, based on essays from some of the world's leading researchers into political behaviour.

The current debate on the vitality of affluent democracies often cites the changing patterns of citizens' political participation as signs of this malaise. Fewer citizens are voting, and more are turning toward contentious and more direct forms of participation. What are the consequences? I describe the participation patterns in affluent democracies and then consider whether these changes in citizen participation are linked to the quality of democratic performance. Some scholars see a more assertive public as overloading the political system or destroying collective views of politics. Others see contentious politics as giving citizens an additional and more effective method of influencing policymakers. The evidence on citizen participation comes from two waves of the International Social Survey Program. Measures of the functioning of government come from the Economist Intelligence Unit and the World Bank. The analyses show that a more active public is correlated with a better functioning government. Moreover, these relationships are stronger for protest and other forms of direct action than for voting in national elections. The results suggest that an assertive and elite-challenging public is more of a boon than a curse for democratic politics.

Reflecting on the articles in this special issue of European Union Politics, this essay first asks whether EU scholarship has sufficiently conceptualized and measured what it means to identify with the European Project and/or the European Community. The evidence in this special issue indicates that many citizens now have attachments to Europe, albeit in uncertain depth. European attachments also exist in combination with or as an alternative to national identities. European/national identities also now overlap with partisan attachments, potentially forming a new basis of political cleavage. The research in this collection demonstrates a rich portfolio of methods to examine this important topic, and yields new evidence of how geographic identities are related to public opinion on issues such as immigration.

Political theorists maintain that citizens' representation through elections is the cornerstone of democracy. However, many analysts claim that a deficit in democratic representation exists within the European Union. This research examines the ideological match between voters and their party using the 2009 European Election Study. Aggregate agreement between voters and their parties' ideological position is very high, but agreement at the individual level is modest. Barely a majority of partisans favor the party that is closest to them on the Left–Right scale, and vote shifts to another party triples the representation gap. We model the factors affecting the size of this gap and voting for a nonproximate party. The results illustrate the representation gap that individual voters perceive in EU elections with implications for democratic representation.