Citizens, Context, and Choice: How Context Shapes Citizens' Electoral Choices(Comparative Study of Electoral Systems)

A large body of electoral studies and political party research argues that the institutional context defines incentives that shape citizen participation and voting choice. With the unique resources of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, this book provides the first systematic evaluation of this topic. A distinguished international team of electoral scholars finds that the institutional context has only a modest impact on citizen political choices compared to individual level factors. Furthermore, the formal institutional characteristics of electoral systems that have been most emphasized by electoral studies researchers have less impact than characteristics of the party system that are separate from formal institutions. Advanced multi-level analyses demonstrate that contextual effects are more often indirect and interactive, and thus their effects are typically not apparent in single nation election studies. The results have the potential to reshape our understanding of how the institutional framework and context of election matters, and the limits of institutional design in shaping citizen electoral behavior.

Table of Contents:
Part I: Introduction 1: Russell J. Dalton and Christopher J. Anderson: Citizens, Context, and Choice Part II: Electoral Participation 2: Miki Caul Kittilson and Christopher J. Anderson: Electoral Supply and Voter Turnout 3: Jeffrey A. Karp and Susan A. Banducci: The Influence of Party and Electoral Systems on Campaign Engagement Part III: Electoral Choice 4: Robin Best and Michael D. McDonald: The Role of Party Policy Positions in the Operation of Democracy 5: Russell J. Dalton: Left-Right Orientations, Context, and Voting Choices 6: Yuliya V. Tverdova: Follow the Party or Follow the Leader? Candidate Evaluations, Party Evaluations and Macropolitical Context 7: Timothy Hellwig: Context, Political Information, and Performance Voting 8: André Blais and Thomas Gschwend: Strategic Defection Across Elections, Parties, and Voters Part IV: Electoral Choice and Representation 9: G. Bingham Powell: Party Polarization and the Ideological Congruence of Governments 10: Christopher J. Anderson: Electoral Supply, Median Voters, and Feelings of Representation in Democracies Part V: Conclusion 11: Christopher J. Anderson and Russell J. Dalton: Nested Voters: Citizen Choices Embedded in Political Contexts Matias Bargsted, Steffen Blings, Christopher J. Anderson, and Russell J. Dalton: Appendix: Macro Level Data Index

About the Author :
Russell J. Dalton was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at UC Irvine. He has received a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Mannheim, a Barbra Streisand Center fellowship, German Marshall Research Fellowship and a POSCO Fellowship at the East/West Center. His scholarly interests include comparative political behavior, political parties, social movements, and empirical democratic theory. He is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Christopher J. Anderson is a team member of the Persistent Poverty and Upward Mobility theme project organized by Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences and the international collaborative project on Making Electoral Democracy Work funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. His research focuses on contextual models of politics that view political actors as nested in a variety of social, economic, and political environments that shape and constrain behavior. In particular, he studies how differences in macro-political contexts across countries shape people's cognition and action. He has long been interested in popular consent and inequality in democracies and has written on the popularity of governments, the legitimacy of political institutions, and the link between welfare states and citizen behavior. He is Professor of Government and Director of the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University.

Review :
The integrative new institutionalism approach of context, institutions and political behaviour makes the book very readable. Citizens, Context, and Choice is an important work that I think belongs on the shelves of all scholars of political behavior. It covers a lot of ground and does so in a focused and rigorous way, building on what we already know about political behavior and yet challenging our understanding. This volume provides a coherent and ground-breaking account of the subtle ways in which formal and less formal institutions may affect voting behaviour. The use of multilevel analytic methods coupled with new finer measures of political organisation (such as the effective number of parties, and of course party polarization) is to be commended... this volume certainly provides an insightful and rigorous study of the dynamics of voting. Citizens, Context, and Choice breaks important new ground in the study of voting behavior, with an exceptionally talented set of contributors providing a variety of studies of how macropolitical contexts affect individuals' electoral choices. The papers are uniformly very good, but this volume is also much more than the sum of its parts. It develops more fully than has ever been done before the concept of "political supply" - the number, distinctiveness, and predictability of choices offered to the voter. And through a number of empirical studies it demonstrates that political supply is a central factor in understanding citizens' choices to participate and the meaning of their vote. This is work that will have to be taken account of in all further studies of electoral choice.