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This chapter examines empirical evidence on MEPs’ behaviour inside the European Parliament. Multivariate analysis of behaviour on several key votes in the chamber directly concerned with the advancement of European integration demonstrates there to be no consistent relationship between greater experience in the chamber (and thus longer exposure to the forces of socialization) and support for advancing European unity. A time-series analysis of the behaviour of new MEPs during the first months of the 1999-2004 parliament shows no tendency for them to become increasingly likely to side with their European rather than national party colleagues when these two forms of party loyalty come into conflict.

This chapter lays out a theoretical framework for understanding referendum behaviour. The core component of the theory is a model of voting behaviour, which outlines how attitudes shape vote choices, influenced by the information that voters receive from political parties and other elites. The framework highlights first that differences in political interest among individuals also lead to diverse patterns of voting behaviour and second, that the campaign context shapes electoral outcomes. Politically aware voters base their vote choice on more sophisticated decision criteria and intense campaigns lead to more issue voting. These two aspects of referendum behaviour ‐ individual‐level differences and campaign effects ‐ are examined in a comparative analysis of EU referendums in the subsequent chapters.

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of voting behaviour in 19 EU referendums held in Denmark, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Spain between 1972 and 2008. It relies on statistical analysis of survey data from these referendums to evaluate the theoretical framework presented in Chapter 2. The results reveal the influence of attitudes towards European integration, partisan loyalties and feelings about the government on voters' decisions. They also highlight that voters differ in their voting behaviour depending on their level of interest in and knowledge of politics. Voters who are more politically aware are more likely to rely on their attitudes towards European integration when deciding in EU referendums compared to voters who pay less attention to politics.

In this case study chapter, four critical referendums are examined in greater detail: the two Danish referendums on the Maastricht Treaty and the two Irish referendums on the Nice Treaty. In both cases, the initial no‐votes were overturned in a second vote. This chapter ask the question: why did some voters change their minds? These case studies trace the dynamics of elite behaviour and public opinion formation during the course of the campaigns. Through in‐depth analyses of newspapers, campaign material, opinion polls, and interviews with key actors in the campaign, this chapter gives a rich description of political behaviour in the campaigns leading up to the referendum votes. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of how differences in the political environment — and specifically the information disseminated by political elites — influenced the behaviour of citizens in these referendums on European integration.

The purpose is to provide an initial assessment of the impact of the introduction of the mixed‐member proportional (MMP) electoral system on the New Zealand political system, especially with regard to the normative criteria established by the New Zealand Royal Commission on the Electoral System. However, since the normative nature of these criteria may limit the breadth of any analysis (they are not necessarily comprehensive and unambiguous, nor do they provide a watertight framework for evaluation), this particular discussion of the impact of MMP on the New Zealand political system is left until the last section. The bulk of the chapter instead employs the findings of political scientists on the relationships between electoral systems, political behavior, and political institutions. These are presented in 10 sections: Anticipating the New Electoral System; The Election and Government Formation; The Political Parties and the Party System; Political Recruitment and Careers; Voting Behavior; Parliament; Government Transition and Durability; Government and the Policy Process; The Future of the New Electoral System; and Winners and Losers. The authors make the point that (as in Germany) personalized geographic representation has continued even as the overall system has been made more proportional.

Introduces the principal questions–why British citizens vote, why they make the party choices that they do, to what extent do they engage with the political process beyond participation in elections, and what does the pattern of engagement over the last four decades tell us about the health of contemporary British democracy–that structure the analyses in various chapters. Chapter 1 also presents an overview of the two major competing theoretical frameworks, the sociological and individual-rationality frameworks, and various specific models located in these frameworks, which are used to answer these questions. The 2001 BES data set and various other data sets employed in the analyses are described, and the content of the several chapters that follow is summarized.

Addresses the question of the relevance the German mixed‐member electoral system has for the party system and for candidate vote, and argues that the mixed‐member electoral system does indeed live up to its German moniker of ‘personalized proportional representation’, in that it provides at once individualized representation of geographic constituencies and proportionality. The analysis proceeds in four steps and discusses the impact of the electoral system on the interparty and intraparty dimensions. The first two sections deal with the impact of the electoral system (a) on the party system, and (b) on voting behavior, with special attention to ticket‐splitting. The third and fourth sections deal with (a) candidate selection and opportunity structures as shaped by the electoral system and the parties, and (b) the likelihood of a district performance‐based personal vote for members of parliament. Concludes with a confrontation of the normative expectations of the founding fathers and empirical reality and speculates about the future of the German party system.

This chapter examines how the campaign context influences voting behaviour in referendums on Europe. Based on analysis of media coverage, opinion polls, and elite polarization, the chapter evaluates how the campaign context shapes political participation and vote choices. The key finding is that as the intensity of the referendum campaign increases, voters will rely more heavily on sophisticated criteria, such as attitudes and issue position, and political elites will find it more difficult to persuade citizens to vote a certain way. Moreover, intense campaigns also mobilize individuals to participate in referendums. Hence, the campaign environment in EU referendums acts as both an informer and a mobilizer and influences patterns of behaviour.

Sweden is undoubtedly a parliamentary democracy. Indeed, many felt that the legislature had become too strong, and the executive too weak. But recently, this argument has been turned round. The Social Democratic Prime Minister, Göran Persson, has frequently been described as a ‘presidential’ figure. Has Sweden become presidentialized?

Organizational changes, including the empowerment of the Prime Minister's Office and the country's accession to the EU in 1994, have certainly enhanced the chief executive's resources. Just as important, though, has been the interaction of the Swedish style of ‘negative parliamentarism’ and the contemporary party system. While the Left bloc has a parliamentary majority, the practical consequence is to make any alternative to a Social Democratic prime minister highly unlikely. With full control of his party, his position becomes nearly impregnable. Other ministers are increasingly recruited from outside parliament, as in a presidential system. When it comes to the electoral face, the picture is less clear. The media are certainly more party-leader-focused. But persuasive evidence that this also applies to voting behaviour has not (yet) been found. In sum, Sweden has become somewhat ‘presidentialized’. But electoral shifts, especially if they lead to change in the party system, could set the process back.

The Michigan model of voting contends that candidate images may influence individual voting behavior. Yet scholarly research has produced mixed results regarding the relative strength of party-based versus candidate-based voting. The present chapter seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate about the personalization of politics as well as the modern role of political parties for electoral behavior in a cross-national setting. Using a methodologically innovative two-step approach to analyzing multilevel data, the chapter looks at how individuals' feelings of representation by political parties and leaders affect their vote choices. The first step involves a regression analysis of 189 vote choice models across thirty-three nations in thirty-five elections. The subsequent step combines the estimates from the first step with party- and system-specific measure for the assessment of contextual effects on the strength of party-based and candidate-based voting. Overall, the results of the analysis confirm that both party and candidate images are important for individual vote choices. Furthermore, the relative strength of party-based and candidate-based voting is in part determined by the macropolitical context.

Combining individual-level survey data with state and county electoral returns, this chapter empirically investigates whether the relationships between local casualties, public opinion, and voting behavior in Iraq parallel those observed during the Vietnam era. The data reveal that some of these relationships in the contemporary conflict are dramatically different from those observed in Vietnam, while others remain eerily similar. Americans' differential exposure to casualties continues to play a significant role in influencing support for the war and for the political leaders charged with directing it. At their core, the results of the analysis of Iraq strongly reaffirm that the casualty gap has critically important political ramifications for American governance. Public opinion turns increasingly against the war when citizens experience the costs of war first-hand through casualties from their local community. Because high casualty-rate communities historically tend to have lower levels of income and education, and their residents are less engaged with politics than their peers from low casualty-rate communities, the dampening effect of casualties on hawkish military policies is weaker in practice than conventional wisdom suggests.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a systematic test of the conventional wisdom that personality is key in contemporary American electoral politics. Using survey data from the six most recent presidential elections, the contours are examines of the candidates’ images (traits), the bases of those images in voters’ more fundamental political predispositions, and the impact of voters’ assessments of the candidates’ personal qualities on individual voting behaviour and on aggregate election outcomes. In stark contrast with the popular conception of contemporary electoral politics as candidate–centred and image–driven, it is argued that candidates’ images are largely epiphenomenal and have only a modest impact on election outcomes. This conclusion is underlined by the analysis given of the 2000 (Bush vs. Gore) presidential election, in which the estimated impact of voters’ assessments of the candidates’ personalities was even smaller than in the previous five elections considered here, although quite probably large enough to be decisive in an election decided by a few hundred votes in a single state.

An established literature in electoral studies maintains that the electoral system and other contextual factors shape the incentive structure for voters, and thereby influences individual electoral behavior. This chapter describes a theoretical framework for differentiating between various types of contextual effects on individual citizens. It also describes the cross-national variation on key contextual variables for nations in the Cross-national Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). Finally, it introduces the chapters of this volume.

Heath, Jowell, and Curtice analyse Margaret Thatcher's distinctive form of British nationalism that embraced a range of issues such as strong defence, vigorous pursuit of British interests in Europe, the protection of British sovereignty, and the maintenance of the Union. They discuss how Thatcherite the electorate was on these issues. As on the economic front, Margaret Thatcher tended to be more extreme than the electorate, both on nuclear defence, where the electorate did not share her enthusiasm for the deployment of American nuclear Cruise missiles in Britain, and on the maintenance of the Union, where the electorate progressively moved away from her brand of British nationalism. On Europe, the Conservatives were closest to the electorate but the disunity of the party over the issue gave out confusing signals to the voters, and the Conservatives proved vulnerable to the Referendum Party created in 1995 with the aim to campaign on the preservation of British sovereignty. The results from the analysis are consistent with the ‘top‐down’ theory of voting behaviour, according to which parties may be able to influence how voters see issues and can themselves shape their supporter's attitudes.

Democracy presumes that elections give citizens an opportunity to evaluate the policies of the incumbent government and make judgments about the desired course of government in the future. This chapter examines how the public's political orientations, based on the Left–Right scale, influence their voting choices. We then consider how the institutional context affects the voters' ability to make such policy linkages, and how institutional contexts shape the microlevel processes of policy voting. The results demonstrate how the institutional structure of electoral systems and the nature of party choices available to the voter can facilitate policy-based voting, and thereby strengthen the process of democratic representation through elections.

This chapter examines what individual voters know about local elections and what factors shape their voting choices. After reviewing how and why we might expect that local voting behavior may differ from presidential voting behavior, it examines a unique dataset of over 1400 voters in thirty different smaller communities that focuses on these questions in particular. In line with their “homevoter” identities, most local voters typically have high knowledge levels about candidates and express a great deal of interest in local affairs. But because of this, local voters tend to employ different criteria than national ones. They are far more likely to base their votes on specific issues or incumbent performance and less likely to utilize heuristics like partisanship or candidate charisma, although this varies somewhat with the size, scope, and bias of their community. Local voters are also more likely to embody the normative expectations of the informed and rational citizen of classical democratic theory.