SAGE Handbook of

Comparative Politics















Comparative Political Behaviour: What is being Compared?
Shaun Bowler
INTRODUCTION
The literature on electoral studies and electoral behaviour is vast, and growing. Any review
of the literature must therefore necessarily be limited, and this chapter is no exception in
picking out only a few elements from that vast literature. In what follows we are concerned
not so much with the specific part of political behaviour being modelled so much as the
implications and limitations of the kinds of comparisons being made. That is, there are a
large number of studies of political behaviour of turnout or of vote choice and so on but in
this chapter the focus is not just on the kinds of political behaviour under view but also the
kinds of comparisons being made.
For a considerable period the intellectual history of electoral studies was driven by
American experience and examples. While there are important intellectual strands that still
derive from American theoretical development the intellectual shift has been away from
seeing the electoral world through an American lens as we begin to see American
experience as one of a class of problems from within a broader theoretical perspective.
What has helped this shift in perspective is a combination of a growth in the number of
democratic states (i.e., cases) coupled with the development of large scale cross national
data collection efforts. These two trends have provided the basis for the comparative study
of mass behaviour and allowed the literature to move from making inferences about how a
particular case differs from or is similar to US experience and to being talking about
comparative political behaviour.
In what follows we distinguish between two broad approaches within this overarching
category of comparative political behaviour. One approach focuses on similarities of social
trends across nations, the other on cross-national institutional comparison and the
consequent differences between nations. Both of these approaches have helped to make
great strides in the development of a comparative approach to political behaviour, but each
of them has a series of strengths and weaknesses that are tied to the kinds of comparisons
they make and the kinds of theoretical claims which interest them.
THE FIRST GENERATION: THE TWIN BUILDING BLOCKS OF A MODEL OF VOTE
CHOICE PARTY IDENTIFICATION AND ECONOMIC VOTING
With relatively few exceptions initial attempts at electoral studies outside the US were built
around a series of national election studies and were developed in light of insights taken
from the American context and typically by American researchers. Thus much of the very
early work on voting and voting behaviour considered vote choice as a major object of
study and examined the role of party identification, leader assessments and issue positions
as drivers of vote choice. Party identification was as in the American context a central
focus and discussions of its antecedents and/or its stability occupied considerable
attention. Gradually, following developments in the US literature, the set of topics and
questions addressed broadened and work began to examine the impact of economic factors
on vote choice in which incumbent performance on key economic indicators was seen to
drive vote choice over and above party identification.
In general this strand of work saw a series of high-quality studies of individual countries
and the development of national election studies in the mould of the American National
Election Study and conducted for example in Britain, Canada and Germany.
But the multi-party nature of politics outside the US limited the applicability of models
derived in the American two party setting. At the very least, American models could not be
applied off the shelf. For example, in models of party identification it became
commonplace to represent party identification on a single continuum ranging from
strongly identifying leftists via weakly identifying leftists through to weakly identifying
rightists and on to strongly identifying rightists. One of the major advantages of this
measurement approach was that it meant that, as a variable, partisanship could be
represented by a single dimension and, further, that this dimension could be treated more
or less as if it were an interval scale. The mapping of this psychological model to a single
left-right policy dimension was an added bonus. In party systems that were dominated by
two large parties this did not present too many problems. Where politics was defined by a
predominantly two-party system such a model was acceptable. The examples of Britain in
the 1960s and 1970s, Germany in the 1970s and, for a while at least, Canada outside of
Quebec in the same period all seemed to have elements that made them ripe for analysis
using American centred models. There were some difficulties but since these only
concerned minor parties or relatively small fractions of the political system they could be
sidestepped. But genuinely multi-party systems would seem to inherently challenge the
idea of a single dimension. In the 1980s the German party system began to change in new
ways. Where, for example, should one place weakly identifying German Greens on the
party identification scale to the left of the SPD or to the right of them? These problems
became even more pressing in nations such as the Netherlands or Italy with many viable
parties. Party identification could either be seen to be represented by one measure per
party or require at least two dimensions one measuring intensity and another reflecting
the left-right policy position. Regardless of challenges to a single dimension of politics
posed by debates over post-materialism (see below), the concept of party identification
seemed to have to be treated as multi-dimensional outside the US.
Multi-partyism poses a similar challenge to the simple but extremely powerful argument of
retrospective voting.
1
The retrospection involved voters judging the performance of the
incumbent on economic issues and, if that performance was seen to be lacking the voter
would cast a vote for the challenger. A standard approach was to use aggregate data to
model the popularity function of an incumbent party, prime minister or president: vote
shares and/or popularity would go up when economic times were good and down when
economic times were bad.
Again, multi-partyism necessarily implies that the simple version of the argument needs to
be revised: in a three party system with one party in power the voter still has to choose
which party to vote for; in a four or five party system and coalition government the voter
also has to decide whether all partners to the government are to be voted against or
whether one coalition member may nevertheless be worthwhile. Thus, while it is possible
within say a popularity function approach to quite readily see a prime minister's popularity
dip in response to economic downturns it can be harder to predict which party will pick up
votes in consequence.
Certainly the problems posed by multi-partyism for the two-party (American) model are
not insurmountable. For example, more sophisticated estimation techniques (multi-nomial
logit/probit) can handle the question of the impact of multi-partyism in a choice
framework (e.g., Alvarez and Nagler, 1998). But the point here is simply that while the
early theoretical running of comparative electoral studies was made by American models
they could not be applied wholesale and off the shelf into other experiences. This point
mattered because the comparative part of comparative political behaviour often meant a
series of case studies and pairwise comparisons with the US typically being the benchmark
country of comparison. More ambitious work examined data from across several different
countries, but the over-arching theoretical models remained the familiar ones of
partisanship, economics and to some extent the social underpinnings of both those
factors. For example, one strand of work considered the class basis of partisanship and
whether it was withering or not. A related strand considered class differences in the kinds
of economic factors of interest in which, say, working class voters being more concerned
with unemployment than inflation while the more job secure middle class voters were
more concerned with inflation than unemployment. Even in these more sociological
flavoured studies intellectual anchors would be typically provided by one or the other of
the twin pillars of voting studies party identification or issue-voting based on economic
indicators of some kind.
These kinds of studies took us a great way along the road to understanding representative
democracy in various nations around the world. But the comparisons were limited by the
use of the US as a benchmark. That is, the framing of research questions was implicitly in
terms of how well or poorly the US model worked rather than an attempt to fold US
experience into a more general model of voter behaviour. That is findings were often
couched in terms such as by contrast to American experience, the experience of country X
shows . Glimpses of a more sustained and more forcefully comparative approach to
voting behaviour could be seen in two influential sets of studies: one set of studies
concerned political culture and the second concerned voter turnout. We will address the
political culture literature in more detail below. For the moment we will consider the
literature on turnout.
While models of partisanship or of economic voting took as their main objects of inquiry
who the voter would choose either to identify with or to vote for models of turnout took
an even more basic question as its starting point: would the voter cast a ballot at all? Work
in this area took an expressly comparative approach whether comparing across US states
or across nations to include institutional factors in the analysis. For example, variations in
electoral rules were seen as a major driver in variations in the motivations of voters to
turnout (e.g., Blais and Dobryzynska, 1998; Franklin, 2004; Jackman, 1987). Unsurprisingly,
compulsory voting is an important determinant of turnout. More surprisingly, perhaps,
proportionality of the electoral system was also seen as a major positive force in prompting
people to go out to vote. This literature thus began to locate individual behaviours within a
context defined by institutions. But the expressly comparative approach of these turnout
studies was largely restricted to explaining the one variable turnout.
A SECOND GENERATION OF STUDIES: NEW DATA TO ADDRESS OLD AND NEW ISSUES
Beginning in the 1990s, however, a number of developments meant a step forward in the
range of topics and theoretical approaches that could be addressed from within a genuinely
comparative framework. One important step was the gradual cumulation of cross-national
data collections. A series of major data collection projects meant the collection of data
across a number of countries at the same time. One prominent example is the Euro-
barometer series of public opinion polls which are conducted at the same time across all
EU member states. Other examples include the World values surveys, the Latinobarometer
and the CSES effort to co-ordinate across national election surveys.
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It is difficult to imagine now, but the early post-WWII studies were conducted in an era
when public opinion polling was relatively new and, since it relied on face-to-face
interviews, very labour intensive. Extensive public opinion polling in the early years was
therefore restricted to a few, richer, states (Britain, Canada, Australia) and ones of
particular concern for historical reasons (Germany). But it meant that in some senses the
study of opinion was to borrow a term frozen by historical circumstance. The only new
democracies from 1945 to 1989 were essentially the cases of Germany, India, Italy and
Japan. If these countries were not surveyed at the time of democratic formation it became
extremely difficult to draw firm conclusions about democratic values and democratization
in retrospect. For example, even if one interviewed the elderly in 1980 it would be difficult
to draw conclusions about what went on in the 1950s in those nations for obvious reasons
of memory and memory-loss. It seemed that the chance to study the democratic moment
had gone. By 1989, however, when a new set of countries became democracies, researchers
were ready with a range of survey tools to examine the transitions in Eastern Europe and
elsewhere brought about by the fall of the Berlin wall. Not only did the fall of the wall bring
about a second chance to examine democratization it also brought about an increase in the
number of cases that scholars could examine.
3
It also helped generate a series of studies on
democratization that were expressly comparative and allowed scholars to assess the
relative impacts of, for example, economic factors on support for democracy as opposed to
more political or value laden factors (e.g., Duch, 1995; Evans and Whitefield, 1995; Rose et
al., 1998). This was only possible because surveys were fielded across these new
democratic nations more or less in real time as democratization unfolded.
Cross-national work of this kind raises issues of translation across languages that are
themselves worth further study and affect our ability to conduct cross-national work
sensibly (Blais et al., 2001; Sinnott 1998). But the availability of properly conducted
opinion polls which asked the same questions of citizens in may different states and often
at the same time meant that the literature as a whole could begin to address more
comparative questions of interest. Furthermore, these surveys allowed researchers to go
beyond the simple behavioural comparison of variation in turnout to examine affective and
cognitive underpinnings of mass behaviour across a newer and wider range of cases than
before in an explicitly comparative approach. These more explicitly comparative
approaches can be loosely categorized into two broad groups. The first of these can be
loosely termed as ones that are interested in socio-cultural approaches to citizen politics
and in particular the use of political culture as an explanation. The second, newer group, is
more institutional in outlook and much less interested in cultural explanations. We
examine each in turn.
SOCIO-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF COMPARATIVE MASS
BEHAVIOUR: SIMILARITIES ACROSS NATIONS
Above we noted that many of the early electoral studies were largely pair-wise
comparisons in which one country was compared to another usually the US. A major
exception to the single country case study approach in the early years of electoral studies
was Almond and Verba's study of civic culture (1963). This was one of the first systematic
and sustained attempts to move beyond a single country study to establish a comparative
framework for the study of public opinion and attitudes. The study was of five countries
Britain, the US, Germany, Italy and Mexico and it sought to establish a culture or way of
doing politics in those nations. Among the conclusions of the study was that Britain and the
US had a participant culture in which citizens were engaged in democracy and, hence,
supportive of it. This kind of culture contrasted with that of the subject political culture of
Mexico in which citizens did not expect to take part in politics and consequently helped
non-democratic forms of government persist (Almond and Verba, 1963).
Since its publication the study has come in for sustained criticism. But the study remains a
landmark in conceptualizing democracy at the mass level and attempted to do so within a
comparative framework. Nevertheless, doubts remain about a cultural approach to mass
behaviour. Perhaps the most straightforward criticism is the observation that the attitudes
of voters could be a product of the political system, rather than a cause and so cultural
arguments often muddle cause and effect. In addition the political culture argument of
Almond and Verba was subject to a series of criticisms that apply to attempts to apply
labels to nations, that is, that they are imprecise in defining the mechanisms at work, they
are definitionally blurred and often assign a level of homogeneity to nationalities that is, at
best, over-stated and, at worst, inconsistent with the main thesis.
Two subsequent research programmes have sought to address some of these criticism by
seeking to be more specific about the mechanisms at work and, also, by being more specific
about the behaviours that are affected and so have breathed new life into the idea of civic
culture.
One of these research programmes has been to cast an understanding of politics in
generational terms. In a series of works Inglehart advanced the argument that different
generations come with different political outlooks (Inglehart, 1977, 1990). In casual
conversation one might, as a passing generalization, refer to the Depression era baby or
boomers as a short-hand for a group of people of a certain age. For Inglehart such
generational markers often come with a meaningful package of political attitudes and
predispositions. This is a more subtle analysis than one in which shifting trends in
demographics are identified and their consequences teased out. To be sure, the changing
class composition of societies have electoral fortunes of parties: as the blue collar working
class shrank over the twentieth century so, too, did the natural constituency of traditional
socialist parties (see for example, Franklin et al., 1992 for an excellent extended discussion
of these kinds of trends). Inglehart's argument, however, is not that the composition of the
electorate changes in terms of who is a member although that does play its part so
much as that what the electorate wants changes.
The big change, for Inglehart, is the shift to a new politics of post-materialism driven by
the accumulation of material wealth and resources.
4
There have been more elaborate
examples of what is meant by the term post-materialism since then but the original survey
instrument (question) gives a straightforward means of understanding the difference in
attitudes being identified:
If you had to choose among the following things, which are the two that seem the most
desirable to you?
Maintaining order in the nation.
Giving people more say in important political decisions.
Fighting rising prices.
Protecting freedom of speech.
Affirmative responses to options 2 and 4 in that list are taken as signs of post-materialism.
Inglehart anticipated that younger, more affluent, voters who no longer experience worries
over economic scarcity should be more ready to support those two responses. He further
expected that these responses should become more and more prevalent over time.
Unfortunately, those expectations were not quite borne out. While significant portions of
the electorate can be said to be post-materialist they do not seem to have produced a
wholly new way of conducting politics. Materialist concerns persist in a number of ways,
either the responses to these survey questions are seen to fluctuate in response to
economic circumstances that suggests that attitudes may not be so much a cultural shift
more a short-term response to circumstances (see for example, Duch and Taylor, 1993 and
subsequent debate). More worryingly still, the share of post-materialists seems not to have
grown very much despite a generation of economic prosperity (and the generational
replacement of older materialist voters by younger post-materialist ones): post-
materialists do not seem to have become the dominant cultural or generational force.
One area in which identifying generational shifts has had more success than others has
been in discussing the changing attitudes towards government and governing. The 1990s
saw a wave of concern about declining regard for politics and politicians. When one looked
at the time series of public sentiment on trust in government or satisfaction with
democracy the trends seemed in a secular trend downwards in the post-war period. In and
of themselves these trends worried many as an erosion of regard for democratic
governance. In the work of Norris and Dalton we see painted in very broad-brush terms
a generational model of what drives trust in government grounded in careful analysis of
cross-national data series. Both authors develop broadly similar themes to document the
rise of what Norris calls the critical citizen (Norris, 1999). Dalton's approach, for example,
is carefully grounded in a social-psychological model of cognitive resources (Dalton, 2004,
2007). That is, voters develop higher expectations of government and of politics and seek
more avenues for participation. Thus newer generations of citizens are at the same time
less trusting of government and traditional means of participation but are often more
participatory in general (see Dalton, 2007). While clearly related to the arguments of post-
materialism this approach is more specific both in its object of explanation (trust in
government) and also in identifying some of the mechanisms at work to produce the
trends.
Another, but ultimately somewhat less successful, way in which cultural explanations have
been revived is through a series of arguments about social capital which comprises the
second of the research programmes that essentially modernize and update the socio-
cultural arguments typified by Almond and Verba. These social capital arguments have a
long intellectual history but in the modern period became highly influential due to the
work of Robert Putnam (Putnam, 2000; Putnam et al., 1993). Putnam's is a much more
specific version of a cultural argument than the ones seen in earlier work of Almond and
Verba but very much in the same theme: individuals who engage in social groups, sports
groups, civic associations, choirs and the like are expected to be much more participatory
and, also, have a set of values that aid democratic governance. An even more specific
version of this argument is found in Verba et al. (1995) who argue that engagement in
social organizations builds specific skill sets of organizational ability among individuals.
That is, learning how to manage a mailing list for a child's soccer team is little different
from managing a mailing list for a candidate or lobby group and, hence, in building
organizational skills informal social organizations such as children's soccer teams or
charities also build the human capital that makes democratic participation easier. To some
extent, we could see the effect of the lack of social capital in the immediate post-wall period
in Eastern Europe. While the scope for democratic action expanded very quickly ordinary
citizens were unaccustomed to such freedom after a generation (or more) of one party rule.
It is not clear that people did at first understand the limits of democratic practice. If they
went on a protest march could they shout slogans? Were they allowed to wave banners?
Could they challenge any onlookers verbally? People did not know how to behave.
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The literature on social capital has taken full advantage of the range of cross-national
survey evidence now available, most notably in the work of van Deth and Hooghe, to
examine the implications of the argument beyond a single country or, even, a small set of
groups. Despite, and in some instances because of, the considerable body of work on this
topic it has not been widely influential as an intellectual project (see Newton, 2001 and van
Deth, 2003 for a thorough conceptual assessment: Hooghe and Stolle, 2003 for a cross-
national application). Some of van Deth's work, for example, in part confirms some of
Weber's conjectures to the effect that heavy social engagement can lead to political
disengagement (van Deth, 2000). Other work notes that even groups that are hostile to
democratic values invest heavily in various bonding kinds of social capital. Indeed, it may
be precisely these sorts of groups extremist, revolutionary and possibly even violent
who invest most heavily in building social capital among their members. While the
literature on social capital is extensive, and discussions of it tap very readily into popular
discussions of what's wrong with society today? the evidence in support of the effects of
social capital is more equivocal and less certain than many proponents would care to
admit.
One of the concerns about over time comparisons of course is the time period taken as a
starting point. For example, if one of the concerns is that regard for democracy has declined
since the 1960s one might wonder what would happen if the 1930s were chosen as the
start point since that period saw widespread support for both fascism and communism
among voters across the democratic world including the US and Britain.
6
Again, then, the
conclusions being drawn depend in part on the implicit comparison being made.
The growing series of opinion data and the growing number of democratic countries have,
over time, provided the means by which scholars can begin to understand social changes
and democratic politics. Early work on cultural or socio-cultural trends have been re-cast
and re-worked into more concrete and more focused examples of cultural underpinnings
to politics both in terms of becoming more specific about the objects of interest (the set of
dependent variables) and also the mechanisms that produce the changes (the independent
variables). Nevertheless, and despite the successes, these literatures do have some
limitations. At the risk of some generalization, by focusing on generational trends in
attitudes and widely shared sets of values or opinions these analyses typically see
democratic politics as being caused by or brought about by social change.
In a sense, this is a theme that has remained within socio-cultural approaches since the
days of Almond and Verba. Democratic institutions while not exactly a black box tend
not to be dealt with in any sustained way. There are, of course, exceptions to that statement
but in general socio-cultural approaches tend to assume the trends should be seen across
institutional environments and not to develop detailed discussion of the kinds of
institutions that may be brought about by cultural change. The socio-cultural approach
seeks similar trends across many nations and so resembles a most different systems
research design. This approach is of course important if the goal is to identify and trace
similar trends across different countries but it does give short shrift to differences between
countries; differences which persist even if one accepts that the time trends are similar and
driven by similar processes.
Socio-cultural approaches also invest voters with a great deal of agency. That is, at least in
the sense that voters in their aggregate have agency because political consequences follow
on from changes in the electorate or changes among voters. What voters do or how
electorates change shape political institutions and the process of democracy but the
institutions do not, in turn, shape voters. It is not, however, entirely clear that voters do
have such agency. Nor is it clear that the causal arrow flows from citizens to institutions
but not vice versa. Buried within socio-cultural approaches, then, is an implied argument
on the limitations of democratic institutions. At a very general level variation in
institutional form simply does not seem to matter very much; what matters in this
literature are general trends at the level of citizens. A more recent literature has developed
a very different understanding of comparative electoral studies by seeking to embed
studies of voting behaviour within its institutional context. In doing so they have developed
a different set of research concerns from those that underpin socio-cultural approaches.
THE DECISION DEPENDENCE OF VOTING: AN INSTITUTIONAL APPROACH TO CROSS-
NATIONAL VARIATION
In focusing on the institutional context of voters, vote choice and voter behaviour it is not
only possible to begin to build a more general model of voter behaviour it is also possible to
begin to understand some of the more fundamental mechanisms of representative
democracy. That is, there is a strong component of decision dependence when it comes to
understanding voters; both their decisions and decision making processes are dependent
upon the institutional context in which they are embedded.
It thus becomes not just possible but also necessary to examine the decision dependence
of voters when we begin to frame questions of interest in terms of cross-national variation
in political institutions rather than cross-national similarity in social processes. Important
examples of work in this area have been a series of books and papers by Chris Anderson
(2000, 2007) Anderson and Wlezien (1997) and Bingham Powell (2000) who take as a
central concern the accountability of governments, a key feature of democratic governance
and one that is closely tied to the literature on economics and voting. While that literature
assumed the institutional context of a two party (US) system subsequent scholars began to
model those assumptions more explicitly.
One key underpinning to the idea of accountability is that voters be able to identify the
government responsible for policy action. In fact, in democratic politics, voters have to be
able to hold governments accountable for their actions in systematic ways. For
representative democracy to work voters need to be able to throw the rascals out of office
and put the competent people into office. But it is much easier for voters to identify who is
responsible for the conduct of policy in some systems than in others. In particular, voters
find it far easier to hold single party governments accountable than to assign responsibility
for actions in coalition systems. In this way, the literature tying shifts in economic variables
to government popularity can be made richer. It is not simply that economic factors inform
voter assessments, but how they manage those assessments and indeed whether they can
act upon them depends on institutional context.
Powell's (2000) work goes a step further to consider the ways in which governments are
not just accountable but also representative. In doing so, he can begin to make comparisons
across systems about important normative concepts. Powell compares the left-right
(policy) positions of voters to the left-right positions of governments arguing that the
closer the government position is to the position of the median voter then the closer the
government is to being representative. On average, coalition governments are closer to the
median voter than are single party governments. In which case, coalition governments may
be more representative kinds of governments even as they may be less accountable, thus
revealing an underlying trade-off in the nature of representative democracy at least so far
as parliamentary democracy is concerned.
There are a series of questions one could raise about this general approach and especially
in relation to the topic of representation. For example while the median voter is an
important figure in rational choice theory it is less clear that they are well suited to
normative evaluations of democracy. Furthermore even assuming that a single left/right
scale is appropriate to use across all polities, there may be problems in matching this
across governments and mass publics. Powell (2000) himself is very careful to try a series
of measures in looking for the gap between median voter and government position, but
while public opinion surveys are extremely useful at establishing where voters may fall on
a left right scale finding a properly commensurable scale for where governments fall is
much harder if as is often the case the voters are not asked to place the government on
the same scale. One solution used is to rely on expert surveys of party placements which, as
Powell is careful to demonstrate, do provide consistent measures.
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Nevertheless, what the work of Powell and others does is to follow along a similar path to
the literature on turnout: it advances a theory of individual political action that is
embedded within a theory of institutions and seeks to test it. Furthermore, the range of
opinions and attitudes that are assessed by these cross-national surveys opens up the
possibility to test more or less any kind of model of voter choice, voter behaviour or
opinion formation with regard to institutional and political variations.
Perhaps the most sustained example of this approach comes in the Comparative Study of
Electoral Systems project. In this project members of national election survey teams agree
to ask a common set of questions and the data from these surveys are made available. In
addition a number of questions about the nation's political institutions are also collected
and made available.
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This combination allows the marrying of individual and institutional level variables in a
number of ways. One example of work using these data is a look at the prevalence of
tactical or strategic voting. In principle all electoral systems should see some form of
strategic voting (see Shiveley, 2005). Most famously, perhaps, is the tactical voting that
underlies (and is caused by) the bias against smaller parties in first past the post systems.
But by comparing across systems it is possible to examine which electoral systems
encourage or allow more strategic voting than others (see also Gschwend, 2007). Similarly
it is possible to examine the motivations of voters across different systems: do voters weigh
the personal characteristics of candidates more heavily in some systems than others? We
know, for example, that some electoral systems provide incentives for candidates to seek a
personal vote (Carey and Shugart, 1995; Farrell and Scully, 2007) but is it the case voters
depend more heavily on assessments of individual candidate attributes to arrive at a
decision in some systems than others? More generally still, the model of vote decision
making with its various components of partisanship, issue and candidate assessment, may
have varying weights across different electoral systems. Thus the model of individual vote
choice can be informed by institutional context that is more or less permissive of tactical
concerns and that values or discounts certain kinds of information.
A similar set of institutional questions tying institutions to attitudes can relate to at least
some of the questions studied from within a socio-cultural framework. Take, for instance,
the example of an understanding of satisfaction with or trust in democracy. Leaving aside
the question of trends over time and whether the trends are shared or not, persistent
differences in levels of trust exist across nations. These differences may be rooted in
different institutional arrangements. Shiveley (2005), for example, notes that satisfaction
with democracy may vary with the decentralization and concentration of political power.
Alienation from government may be determined by the nationalization of politics. As more
decisions are made at the national level and fewer at the local level then politics may
seem more remote from citizens and, hence, less trustworthy. Mistrust of government may
reflect a sense of perceived distance from government in which case decentralization of
power may help re-engage citizens. Evidence consistent with this argument comes from the
literature on second order elections in which voter turnout is, in part, driven by how
consequential the election is to voters (Marsh, 1998; Percival et al., 2007; Reif and Schmitt,
1980). If elections simply do not matter very much to voters if not very much is at stake
voters will not turn out and vote. Again, then, the kinds of voter decision-making we see
over turnout and affect towards the political process are shaped in fundamental ways by
the type of decision they are asked to make at election time.
Even after the election we may see consequences of the kinds of decisions voters are asked
to make in terms of how citizens feel about the government in power. Anderson and
Guillory (1997) and Anderson et al. (2005) also address how different institutional
arrangements shape satisfaction with democracy. Politics and elections in particular
sort citizens into winners and losers but different political systems make the loss and the
sense of loss greater than others. So, for example, single party winner take all systems
make citizens from the out parties feel a greater sense of loss than multi-party coalition
systems that build broad bases of support.
The institutional approach thus considers a different set of questions than the socio-
cultural approach. It has also developed a series of successes in understanding how and
why elections vary across nations. As the research programme on the institutional effects is
worked out, however, several issues remain to be worked on.
First, while the focus to date is often on cross-national comparison there is a great deal of
value to making comparisons across sub-national units states, provinces or even cities.
But the emphasis on national politics often overshadows the sub-national dimension. There
are several reasons for a greater appreciation for sub-national studies. Cross-national
comparisons can still invite criticism from a cultural perspective: if people are also
embedded in cultural institutions that are not appropriately measured then the models (of
turnout, trust or accountability) will be under-specified and may provide omitted variable
bias. Within-country comparisons should reduce the number of omissions while at the
same time allowing a focus on institutional effects.
Furthermore, if the election of interest is a national level general election then these are
more or less by definition atypical: they are high profile, high spending, and high stakes
elections. US Presidential elections, for example, are probably the most studied elections,
yet they are the least typical elections. The more usual kind of elections are local ones low
information and low-engagement elections. The comparison across regions or political
units within a single country, then, should provide scope for work on whether institutions
do, in fact, make a difference (see e.g., Hoffmann-Martinot et al., 1996).
Second, the study of the institutional bases of mass behaviour and public opinion has
helped generate over-confidence in our ability to bring about changes in voter opinions and
behaviours. Take, for example, this statement made by IDEA (Institute for Democracy and
Electoral Assistance http:/ / idea.int/ elections/ index.cfm) an international think tank
on electoral design:
The choice of electoral system is one of the most important institutional decisions for any
democracy. Electoral systems define and structure the rules of the political game; they help
determine who is elected, how a campaign is fought, the role of political parties, and most
importantly, who governs. Furthermore, the choice of an electoral system can help to
engineer specific outcomes, such as to encourage cooperation and accommodation in a
divided society. (IDEA, 2008)
This is a fairly typical kind of statement in part because the tie between electoral systems
and electoral behaviour appears to be both clear-cut and well understood. But it is far from
clear how precisely we can engineer outcomes. Much of our confidence in the ability to
engineer outcomes comes from the results of cross-sectional models but it is not always
clear that we have established appropriate causal relations. There are very few examples of
being able to track changes among the public in light of institutional changes. New Zealand
may be one of the few cases for which we have the data available to track these kinds of
concerns.
9

Our over-confidence in our ability to engineer is related, in part, to a third issue: there is a
need for greater theoretical work on institutions and their effects. Certainly, some work on
socio-cultural patterns does not seem to be terribly theoretically sophisticated either. In
fact in some instances early work on social trends seems to involve identifying trends in
data post hoc. By contrast to such work the institutional approach seems to be much more
theoretically driven. Nevertheless, there is some scope for greater theoretical development
within the institutional approach. While the guiding impulse is to examine mass behaviour
embedded within the context of institutions the theories of institutions we examine often
involve very large-scale differences. Much of the work on electoral systems in the vein of
Duverger's Law considers different effects of first past the post and list PR systems. These
differences seem to be real and persistent. But these two electoral systems are very
different from each other; ranged in-between these two extreme points are a series of
electoral systems that may or may not have such stark effects. Our confidence seems to be a
product more of our understanding of the more extreme examples of electoral systems
rather than the range of ground in between. A better understanding of institutions might
help better ground our confidence in our ability to engineer.
10

Relatedly, it is not always clear that the literature shares a common definition of what
constitutes an institution. The de facto choice of institutions included in analysis often
seems to gravitate towards the formal and constitutional rather than the less formal, but
this need not be the only kind of institution to consider. While it is true that political parties
may be seen as organizations rather than institutions one would think that even as
organizations their actions are likely to have as much impact on election outcomes as less
formal associations and organizations that build social capital. Yet political parties and
their actions are often absent from models looking at political behaviour in this
institutional sense.
Similarly, some institutional effects really compare not just one institution to another but
bundles of institutions to other bundles of institutions. For example the distinction
between consensus and majoritarian democracies is due to Lijphart, who has formed a
major conceptualization of democratic institutions taken up by the literature to date (e.g.,
Lijphart 1984, 1994). It is hard to understate Lijphart's contribution in bringing
institutions back in to the comparative study of representative democracy. Yet his
categories are not simply one institution but bundles of institutions some of which are
related to each other in obvious ways (coalition governments and PR for example), but
other aspects of which are not (central bank independence and federalism). Furthermore,
these categories seem not so much to be theories in themselves as inductively arrived at
ideal types (grounded in the contrast between British/New Zealand experience on the one
hand and Dutch experience on the other) that operate in different ways. To be sure, there
are consequences and hypotheses that can be drawn from his models. And the influence of
his work in many different areas shows just how important his categorization has been.
Nevertheless, the differences he discusses are broad ranging and broad brush. It is not
entirely clear which institutional arrangement within a given bundle is the most important
one, or whether its effects are contingent on or interactive with the effects of other
institutions. The comparison across bundles of institutions, then, can still leave a degree of
uncertainty about what is doing the work.
In part because institutional approaches are sometimes somewhat under-theorized beyond
the general belief that we should see institutional effects it might, therefore, be worth
exercising more caution about our collective capacity to engineer before investing too
heavily in an institutional approach. After all, if only large-scale differences in institutional
arrangements make a difference to mass behaviours and attitudes then perhaps there is
only limited scope for institutional arguments?
Finally, experimental methods have remained relatively under-utilized to date but would
seem especially appropriate to use to explore institutional arguments. The ability to
conduct comparative work has been supported by the range of available survey data and
the range of statistical tools available to analyze those data. For example, hierarchical or
multi-level models now mean there is a way to appropriately combine country level
institutional factors and individual level data. But experimental methods have a great deal
of promise to allow scholars to focus on the micro-mechanisms of opinion and attitude
formation across different institutional contexts. Heaney and Hanson (2006) note the
contributions of the Chicago based scholars Gosnell, Merriam and others in the 1920s and
1930s in using experimental techniques. The advent of large scale public opinion polls
seemed to have pushed aside this kind of experimental work until their re-popularization
in the American context (e.g., Druckman, 2004; Gerber and Green, 2000: Lupia and
McCubbins, 1998). Some work outside the US setting has been conducted using
experiments. Bochel and Denver (1971) for example is a fore-runner of the Gerber and
Green experiments on inducing voter turnout from the British case, while other
experimental work has proved especially valuable in developing societies where survey
work may be difficult to conduct (e.g., Duch and Palmer, 2004; Wantchekon, 2003; Whitt
and Wilson, 2007). The scope for more work of this kind seems especially promising. As
with other techniques, however, the value of the results depends on strong theory.
CONCLUSION
As we noted at the outset, any review of such a vast literature as that on electoral studies
cannot pretend to be encyclopaedic. In this review large sections of the literature have
simply been put to one side in order to focus more on the kinds of comparisons that are
being made by different kinds of work in comparative electoral studies.
What we have termed a socio-cultural approach is often genuinely comparative in scope.
But the framing of these studies is such that the work is often aimed more at identifying
similarities across nations than in exploring differences between them. This seems to be
especially the case when it comes to identifying whether political institutions have an
effect, and if so how. By contrast the institutional approach suggests that political
institutions are seen to have a great deal of impact over the way that citizens feel and act
within representative democracy. It is an approach that emphasizes the differences and de-
emphasizes similarities, and it is this approach that seems to be the more vigorous one at
present as the consequence of an institutional perspective are worked out.
This chapter has, then, identified two broad categories of work within the literature on
comparative electoral studies that have different theoretical and substantive concerns that
are tied, in part, to the kinds of comparisons they make. The growing sophistication of
statistical and experimental tools and the ever-growing collection of data means that the
capacity to make meaningful comparisons is better now than at any previous time. To the
extent there are limitations in the kinds of comparisons that may be drawn they seem to be
based in theoretical constraints rather than practical ones such as data availability. In many
ways the theoretical impetus given by ideas on social capital and on an institutional
process have either run their course or, at least in the case of institutional studies, are
gradually being worked out. One other possible source of new theoretical energy may be
for more empirically minded scholars to reengage with normative political theory. Many of
the earliest studies of voting were often heavily influenced by normative concerns over the
ideal citizen grounded in the work of theorists such as John Stuart Mill (Berelson, 1952).
To some extent the work of Dalton and others has already begun the process of re-
engagement with newer normative concerns such as those over deliberation and revised
definitions of citizenship. Similarly, current concerns about the relationship between Islam
and democracy will give an impetus to inter and intra national comparisons concerning the
relationship between religious values and democracy. Even so, it may be an appropriate
point to attempt a more systematic re-engagement.
NOTES
1. A major impetus for this attention to economic factors came from outside the voting
studies literature itself and more from the late 1970s and early 1980s literature on the
political business cycle, that is, the argument that governments manipulated macro-
economic levers for electoral advantage. While issue positions had been a big part of voting
studies the heavy emphasis on economics and the subsequent debates over retrospective
versus prospective and pocket book versus socio-tropic voting did not occur until after
the political business cycle literature.
2. As something of an aside we should note that in recent years, too, data collection for
some single country cases have surpassed, and often far surpassed, the example of the
American National Election Study in terms of the kinds of questions that may be
investigated. The Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand election studies have
especially well-developed value-added components compared to their American counter-
parts. These national surveys may include candidate surveys, rolling cross-sections, media
analysis or combinations. The data are also readily available.
3. The main effects of the post 1989 changes, however, remain the dramatic improvements
in the lives and well-being of millions of people as well as a series of traumas suffered by
large numbers of people in the transitions.
4. Ingelhart's work also marks a major conceptual improvement over some socio-cultural
approaches in that he does develop an explicit theory and a set of predictions; some socio-
cultural approaches that are content to describe demographic patterns after the event.
5. The skill set argument is not something to take on board without questioning. Some of
the skills being discussed would not seem to require too steep a learning curve and hence
not require a long apprenticeship in non-profits or other informal groups. Similarly, it is
not clear what makes someone volunteer as an organizer in an informal group to begin
with. Perhaps these skills are just markers for socio-economic status, for example, being a
stay-at-home parent or grandparent who used to work in an office with PCs.
6. See, for example, footage of the Cable Street Riots in London in 1936 http:/ /
www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-AQDOjQGZuA. Similarly, some of the discussion of social
capital seems to suggest that things have become worse in a social capital sense from
some idealized good old days in which people got along with their neighbours and
volunteered a lot more. Given that the good old days of the 1950s and 1960s were also
associated with high levels of racism, sexism and homophobia coupled with lower levels of
education, wealth and home ownership one could be forgiven for wondering whether the
good old days were really that good.
7. More vigorous critiques of some aspects of the Lijphart-Powell conjectures and a flavour
of some of the debates may be found in Pinto-Duchinksy (1999).
8. There is an extensive web presence of the CSES project see http:/ / www.cses.org/
resources/ results/ results.htm
9. Saideman et al. (2002) are an exception they use a pooled time series analysis to look
at ethnic conflict and electoral institutions.
10. Newer theoretical work on institutions for example Tsebelis' work on veto players
may help address some of these issues. Tsebelis' argument, for example, can easily be seen
as a way to ground at least some studies of comparative electoral behaviour such as those
relating to accountability or efficacy (Tsebelis, 2002).
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Entry Citation:
Bowler, Shaun. "Comparative Political Behaviour: What is being Compared?." The SAGE
Handbook of Comparative Politics. 2009. SAGE Publications. 7 May. 2010.
<http://www.sage-ereference.com/hdbk_compolitics/Article_n15.html>.
Chapter DOI: 10.4135/978-1-8570-2108-0.n15