Voting in Old and New Democracies takes advantage of the rich and invaluable resource provided by 26 election surveys from 17 countries and Hong Kong to dramatically improve our understanding of voter attitudes and behaviors across a wide range of polities. Throughout the book, the authors evaluate and modify extant theories of attitudes and behaviors developed based on the U.S. and Western European experiences, applied to several of those countries but also to a wide range of newer democracies, spanning the globe from Latin America to Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. The book reads much more like a multiauthored tome than like an edited volume containing a series of disparate chapters on a similar topic. It flows extremely well from start to finish, with every chapter complementing the others.
All 26 surveys used in this volume were conducted under the aegis of the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP), which dates back to the late 1980s. The CNEP was the brainchild of a group that belonged to what could be referred to as the second generation of mass voting behavior scholars, individuals such as Paul Beck (an editor and author of this volume), Russell Dalton, and Merrill Shanks, who had been trained by the “first generation” of those scholars, such as Philip Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes.
The late 1980s and 1990s witnessed the crest of the Third Wave of democratization, and at that time there emerged a great desire among scholars to extend and generalize theories of voting behavior and political attitudes developed in consolidated OECD democracies, such as Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, to emerging democracies throughout the globe. The CNEP provided the vehicle to conduct comparable surveys in a mixture of old (e.g., Great Britain, Italy, and the United States), middle-aged (Greece, Portugal, Spain), and young (Argentina, Bulgaria, Hungary, South Africa, Taiwan, Uruguay) democracies to evaluate the generalizability of existing theories and, where appropriate, revise and extend them to better fit the realities of these emerging democracies.
The editors represent some of the leading figures in global public opinion research. They also represent two distinct academic generations: Paul Beck and Richard Gunther received their Ph.D.s in the 1970s (1971 and 1977), and Alejandro Moreno and Pedro Magalhães received theirs two to three decades later (1997 and 2003). Beck and Gunther are emeritus professors of political science at The Ohio State University. Beck is long acknowledged as one of the leaders in the study of U.S. public opinion, and Gunther is a pioneer and leading expert in the study of public opinion in democratic Spain following the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975. Moreno is a professor of political science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and is widely seen as the foremost expert on Mexican public opinion. In addition to his academic appointment at ITAM, Moreno directs the most respected polling operation in Mexico as the in-house pollster for the country’s most influential newspaper, La Reforma. Magalhães is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences at the Universidade de Lisboa and one of Portugal’s most prominent scholars of public opinion.
This outstanding volume takes full advantage of the rich treasure trove of data provided by the CNEP to advance scholarly understanding of voter attitudes and behaviors throughout the globe. The volume is bookended by an excellent introduction and conclusion written by the four editors. And, with one exception, the six substantive chapters are written or co-written by one or more of the four book editors. The chapters cover a wide array of citizen attitudes and behavior, ranging from values to voting, with the common thread of the utilization of the CNEP dataset to conduct rigorous cross-national analysis.
The first substantive chapter, “Global Patterns of Exposure to Political Intermediaries,” is written by Beck and Gunther, and focuses on the topic of patterns of exposure to political intermediaries across the globe. The authors begin the chapter by highlighting the reality that an overwhelming majority of citizens obtain their information about politicians and issues from intermediary sources: the mass media, personal discussion networks, and secondary associations.
Based on their cross-national analysis of the CNEP data, the authors come to several salient conclusions regarding political intermediaries and citizen attitudes and behavior. First, the most influential determinants of media exposure are strongly linked to those posited by modernization theory; in particular, education, wealth, and urbanization. Second, a commonality across all countries is the salience of personal discussions that respondents have with family, friends, and co-workers to their political behavior and attitudes. Third, in almost all the countries surveyed, the importance of secondary associations in exposing people to political messages paled in comparison to the mass media and personal discussions.
The next chapter, “Mobilization, Informal Networks and the Social Contexts of Turnout,” is written by Magalhães, with Paolo Segatti and Tianjian Shi. The authors begin with a familiar but illusive question, why do some individuals vote while others do not? (64). They take advantage of the cross-national CNEP data to examine both individual explanations for differential turnout and a set of explanations based on the political context (political institutions, mobilization efforts, social networks) in which an election occurs, which vary considerably across the CNEP polities. The authors conclude, as did those in the previous chapter, that political intermediation plays a powerful role in determining voting behavior, with personal conversations with relatives of particular importance in understanding the turnout and vote choices. At the institutional level, the data suggest that compulsory voting requirements (with enforcement) are, unsurprisingly, associated with higher turnout, and in the presence of these strict compulsory rules, the relevance of other explanatory variables that are important predictors of turnout in other polities diminishes.
Moreno’s chapter, “Value Cleavages Revisited,” examines how much the value cleavages that have been seen as having a powerful effect on competition among political parties in consolidated Western democracies are equally useful in understanding partisan competition in newer democracies in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The applicability of the advanced industrial model of values and left-right orientation as a predictor of partisanship and voting behavior transfers well to some new democracies, such as Chile and Uruguay, but not to the other Latin American new democracies of Argentina and Mexico, nor to the African democracies of Mozambique and South Africa. A cautionary conclusion from the chapter is that scholars should employ left-right scales and metrics based on ideological orientation with caution as they move out beyond the advanced industrial democracies in which these scales were initially created. Although these are valuable tools with which to understand party competition and electoral behavior in some new democracies, they add very little value to the understanding of these factors in other contexts.
Moreno’s discussion of value cleavages is extended in the subsequent chapter, “The Changing Determinants of the Vote,” by Gunther, Marina Costa Lobo, Paolo Belluci, and Marco Lisi. These authors analyze the determinants of voter behavior in 19 elections spread over 15 polities. They conclude that there is no “one size fits all” model of vote choice that works well in all countries. In terms of broader conclusions, they highlight the declining salience of sociodemographic factors in predicting voter behavior as countries become more economically developed. At the same time, they emphasize that the value of ideological orientation and partisan identification in explaining how citizens cast their votes remains strong in those countries where it has traditionally been relevant, such as Italy and the United States, and does not appear to be in decline there, as some observers have suggested.
The final cross-national chapter is “Parties, Elections, Voters and Democracy.” In this chapter, Robert Mattes and four colleagues focus on ten new democracies to illuminate how citizens in these polities understand and experience democracy and to what extent they are satisfied with the de facto functioning of their democracy and prefer it to rival forms of governance. The authors also study how these four different factors interact with and influence each other. An important conclusion made by Mattes et al. is that while there are limits, political parties and politicians can exercise significant influence on the level of citizen satisfaction with, and support for, democracy through their actions and statements, in both positive and negative ways.
Voting in Old and New Democracies is a tour de force that dramatically improves scholarly understanding of why and how people turn out to vote and vote the way they do in a diverse group of democracies that vary dramatically in terms of their age, consolidation, level of economic development, and democratic quality. It is a book that I encourage all scholars of electoral behavior to read, and to read carefully.
