Synopses & Reviews
Citizens living in presidential or parliamentary systems face different political choices as do voters casting votes in elections governed by rules of proportional representation or plurality. Political commentators seem to know how such rules influence political behavior. They firmly believe, for example, that candidates running in plurality systems are better known and held more accountable to their constituencies than candidates competing in elections governed by proportional representation. However, such assertions rest on shaky ground simply because solid empirical knowledge to evaluate the impact of political institutions on individual political behavior is still lacking. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems has collected data on political institutions and on individual political behavior and scrutinized it carefully. In line with common wisdom results of most analyses presented in this volume confirm that political institutions matter for individual political behavior but, contrary to what is widely believed, they do not matter much.
About the Author
Hans-Dieter Klingemann is Professor Emeritus at the Social Science Research Center, Berlin.
Table of Contents
Preface,
Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Ian McAllisterForeword, Hans-Dieter Klingemann
About the Contributors
Part I Introduction
1. The Impact of Political Institutions, Hans-Dieter Klingemann
Part II The Project
2. 'Big Social Science' in Comparative Politics, Ashley Grosse and Andrew Appleton
3. Methodological Challenges, David A. Howell and Karen Long Jusko
Part III Electoral Participation
4. Socio-economic Status and Non-voting, Neil Nevitte, Andre Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, and Richard Nadeau
5. Electoral Systems, Efficacy, and Voter Turnout, Susan A. Banducci and Jeffrey A. Karp
Part IV Political Parties, Candidates, and Issues
6. Multiple Party Identifications, Hermann Schmitt
7. Candidate Recognition in Different Electoral Systems, Soren Holmberg
8. Who Represents Us Best? One Member or Many?, John Curtice and W. Phillips Shively
9. Economic Voting, Yoshitaka Nishizawa
10. The Ease of Ideological Voting, Martin Kroh
11. How Voters Cope With the Complexity of Their Political Environment, Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Bernhard Wessels
Part V Expressive and Instrumental Voting
12. Expressive versus Instrumental Motivation of Turnout, Partisanship, and Political Learning, Gabor Toka
13. District Magnitude and the Comparative Study of Strategic Voting, Thomas Gschwend
Part VI Political Support
14. Institutional Variation and Political Support: An Analysis of CSES Data from 29 Countries, Ola Listhaug, Bernt Aardal, and Ingunn Opheim Ellis
15. Effectiveness and Political Support in Old and New Democracies, Jacques Thomassen and Henk van der Kolk
Appendix 1: Final Report of the 1995-6 Planning Committee
Appendix 2: The micro-level questionnaire of Module 1
Appendix 3: The macro-level questionnaire of Module 1