The Act of Voting ─ Identities, Institutions and Locale

Electoral behaviour is one of the most dynamic areas of study in the field of comparative politics today, and, indeed represents one of the largest fields of political behavior research.

This book looks to set the study of voting behaviour in its wider context, i.e. to understand that the actions and behaviour of the individual (non)voter are conditioned by the wider environment in which the election is occurring.

Separated into four parts, this study looks at:

• Identity and the Act of Voting; which examines cross-national data to assess the multi-level nature of identities across an integrating Europe, seeking in particular to understand what may drive a growing sense of Europeanness.

• Institutions; or how old and somewhat artificial divides between behaviouralism and institutionalism have started to break down as an increasing number of behaviouralists devote more attention to the interplay between institutions and electoral behaviour
• The locale; eexamining how party actors, and others, cajole, encourage, enthuse voters to the polling booth and why people participate in politics.
• Finally, in Part 4 the book arrives at the moment of voting – the act of voting. Blais use US survey data to assess the relative merits of three sets of alternative indicators of electoral turnout – ‘intention to vote’, ‘reported vote’ and ‘validated vote’ – their findings tending to support the recent predilection for pre-election vote intention in turnout studies in preference to the other two measures.

Professor David M. Farrell (University College Dublin) is a leading expert in the study of parties and elections. Joint editor of Party Politics and of the Oxford University Press series in Comparative Politics, his most recent (prize winning book) is Political Parties and Democratic Linkage (Oxford University Press, 2011; co-authored with Russell Dalton and Ian McAllister).

Dr Johan A. Elkink (University College Dublin) is currently involved in research concerning the estimation of spatial econometric models with discrete dependent variables, which are common in studies of policy diffusion, regime transitions, and voting behaviour. His work on democratic diffusion was published in the journal Comparative Political Studies. He co-authored reports on voting behaviour in the Irish referendums on the Lisbon Treaty and on that of party members in the Netherlands.