Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Consequences of Context: How the Social, Political, and Economic Environment Affects Voting

This book presents the most systematic and consistent study to date of the 'consequences of context' for the process through which citizens decide on their electoral behaviour. It derives contextual variation from cross-national and within-country comparisons. The contextual dimensions investigated pertain to the political, economic and social domains, and their impact is investigated on the factors that drive citizens' decision to participate in an election and on their subsequent decision of which party to vote for. The book thus focuses not on whether people vote and for which party, but instead on more fundamental questions about contextual effects on the determinants of electoral participation and the vote. The analyses are based on an integrated database of national election studies conducted in European countries and utilises an innovative multi-level logistic regression methodology. This methodology, elaborated in detail early on and subsequently applied in each of the following chapters, identifies the moderating effect, or the "consequences", of altogether nine classes of different context conditions on individual level determinants of electoral participation and party choice. Review By far, the most promising development in the field of voting behavior over the last years has been its shift from methodological individualism to a more nuanced view of individuals as embedded within a given historical, socioeconomic and political context. No other book better signifies this turn than the current volume, which stresses key dimensions in which the context determines voters' preferences, elite's strategies and the interplay between the two. An invaluable source for any well-informed student of comparative political behavior.--Elias Dinas, Swiss Chair in Federalism, Democracy and International Governance at the European University Institute in Florence This is a superb book by a stellar collection of scholars. Based on the research in comparative political behavior, the authors observe that the micro foundations of voting tend to be the same everywhere and yet the influence of different factors varies across space and time. They then set out to theorize and empirically assess the influence of electoral context, broadly defined, on individuals' voting behavior. I am impressed by what they have accomplished - from conceptualization to modeling to estimation - and this changed both how I think about context and, especially, how I (and others) will analyze its consequences.--Christopher Wlezien, Hogg Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin About the Author Hermann Schmitt is a Research Fellow, Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung and an Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Humanities, University of Manchester. Paolo Segatti is Professor of Political Sociology at the Università degli Studi di Milano. Cees van der Eijk is Professor of Social Science Research Methods at the University of Nottingham.