Russell J. Dalton

Cognitive Mobilization and Partisan Dealignment in Advanced Industrial Democracies

Theories of mass politics have stressed the value of partisanship in providing citizens with cues for political decision making. The expanding political skills and resources of contemporary electorates are, however, increasing the abilities of the public and lessening the need for partisan cues. A process of cognitive mobilization in advanced industrial societies is creating a substantial number of apartisans, sophisticated individuals who lack party ties. Data from an eight-nation survey document the correlates of changing mobilization patterns, and link these findings to a new style of dealigned politics.

The Social Calculus of Voting: Interpersonal, Media, and Organizational Influences on Presidential Choices

Voting choices are a product of both personal attitudes and social contexts, of a personal and a social calculus. Research has illuminated the personal calculus of voting, but the social calculus has received little attention since the 1940s. This study expands our understanding of the social influences on individual choice by examining the relationship of partisan biases in media, organizational, and interpersonal intermediaries to the voting choices of Americans. Its results show that the traditional sources of social influence still dominate: Interpersonal discussion outweighs the media in affecting the vote. Media effects appear to be the product of newspaper editorial pages rather than television or newspaper reporting, which contain so little perceptible bias that they often are misperceived as hostile. Parties and secondary organizations also are influential, but only for less interested voters—who are more affected by social contexts in general. Overall, this study demonstrates that democratic citizens are embedded in social contexts that join with personal traits in shaping their voting decisions.

Political Parties and Political Representation Party Supporters and Party Elites in Nine Nations

Political representation in most Western democracies occurs through and by political parties. Based on parallel surveys of voters and party elites in nine West European nations, this article examines how well parties perform their representation role. The opinions of voters and party elites are compared for 40 party dyads. In some cases there is close correspondence between these opinions (e.g., economic and security issues), but in other instances the evidence of voter-party agreement is substantially weaker (e.g., foreign policy). An examination of party characteristics and contextual factors suggests that the clarity of party positions, represented by a centralized party structure and noncentrist ideology, strongly influences the efficiency of the party linkage process.

The Quantity and the Quality of Party Systems: Party System Polarization, Its Measurement, and Its Consequences

Previous research claims that the number of parties affects the representation of social cleavages in voting behavior, election turnout, patterns of political conflict, and other party system effects. This article argues that research typically counts the quantity of parties and that often the more important property is the quality of party competition—the polarization of political parties within a party system. The author first discusses why polarization is important to study. Second, the author provides a new measurement of party system polarization based on voter perceptions of party positions in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, which includes more than 50 separate elections from established and developing democracies. Third, the author compares party polarization and party fractionalization as influences on cleavage-based and ideological voting and as predictors of turnout levels. The finding is that party polarization is empirically more important in explaining these outcomes.

Political parties and democratic linkage : how parties organize democracy

PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. Parties and Representative Government PART II: PARTIES AND ELECTION CAMPAIGNS 2. Parties and Electoral Institutions 3. Party Mobilization and Campaign Participation PART III: ELECTORAL CHOICE 4. Citizens and their Policy Preferences 5. Party Images and Party Linkage 6. Voter Choice and Partisan Representation PART IV: PARTIES IN GOVERNMENT 7. Government Formation and Democratic Representation 8. Party Policies and Policy Outputs PART V: CONCLUSION 9. Party Evolution Index

The Individual–Institutional Nexus of Protest Behaviour

Political protest is seemingly a ubiquitous aspect of politics in advanced industrial societies, and its use may be spreading to less developed nations as well. Our research tests several rival theories of protest activity for citizens across an exceptionally wide range of polities. With data from the 1999–2002 wave of the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that the macro-level context – levels of economic and political development – significantly influences the amount of popular protest. Furthermore, a multi-level model examines how national context interacts with the micro-level predictors of protest activity. The findings indicate that contemporary protest is expanding not because of increasing dissatisfaction with government, but because economic and political development provide the resources for those who have political demands.

The Social Transformation of Trust in Government

The phenomenon of declining political trust among the American public has been widely discussed, with the explanations often focusing on specific historical events or the unique problems of American political institutions. We first demonstrate that public doubts about politicians and government are spreading across almost all advanced industrial democracies. The pervasiveness of this trend suggests that common social forces are affecting these nations, and we examine the social correlates of the decrease in trust. We find the greatest declines are among the better-educated and upper social status. These results suggest that changing citizen expectations, rather than the failure of governments, are prompting the erosion of political support in advanced industrial democracies.

A Quarter-Century of Declining Confidence

A quarter-century ago, Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki argued that the nations of Europe, North America, and Japan confronted a “crisis of democracy.” Their starting point was a vision, widespread during the 1960s and 1970s, of “a bleak future for democratic government,” an image of “the disintegration of civil order, the breakdown of social discipline, the debility of leaders, and the alienation of citizens.” The central thesis of the subtle, nuanced, and wide-ranging analysis by Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki (hereafter CH&W) was that the Trilateral democracies were becoming overloaded by increasingly insistent demands from an ever-expanding array of participants, raising fundamental issues of governability. Within that common framework, the three authors offered somewhat distinct diagnoses of the problems facing their respective regions. In Europe, Crozier emphasized the upwelling of social mobilization, the collapse of traditional institutions and values, the resulting loss of social control, and governments’ limited room for maneuver. Huntington asserted that America was swamped by a “democratic surge” that had produced political polarization, Susan J. Pharr, Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics at Harvard University, is the author of Losing Face: Status Politics in Japan (1990) and Media and Politics in Japan (1996). Robert D. Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, is the author of Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993) and Bowling Alone: Decline and Renewal of the American Community (forthcoming, June 2000). Russell J. Dalton, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California at Irvine, is author of Critical Masses (1999) and The Green Rainbow (1994). This essay is adapted from the introductory chapter to Pharr and Putnam’s edited volume Disaffected Democracies: What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries? (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Partisanship and Party System Institutionalization

Party identification, the psychological bond between citizens and a political party, is one of the central variables in understanding political behavior. This article argues that such party ties are also a measure of party system institutionalization from the standpoint of the public. We apply Converse’s model of partisan learning to 36 nations surveyed as part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. We find that electoral experience and parental socialization are strong sources of partisanship, but the third-wave democracies also display evidence of latent socialization carried over from the old regime. The results suggest that party identities can develop in new democracies if the party system creates the conditions to develop these bonds.

Communists and Democrats: Democratic Attitudes in the Two Germanies

German unification has revived earlier scholarly debates about the nature of the German political culture and the ability of the nation to rise above its cultural heritage – now focused on the cultural inheritance from the German Democratic Republic. This article examines popular support for democratic attitudes as a prerequisite for successful political unification and the development of democracy in a unified Germany. Our evidence focuses on a study of democratic attitudes conducted in West Germany and East Germany by the Mannheim Research Unit for Societal Development in early 1990, with supplemental data from more recent surveys. We find that East Germans voice support for democratic attitudes that rivals or excels the expression of democratic norms in the West. The correlates of these opinions suggest that democratic norms in the East developed from an on-going process of counter-cultural socialization and from judgements about the relative economic strength of the Federal Republic.