Selected Publications

A burgeoning literature studies compulsory voting and its effects on turnout, but we know very little about how compulsory voting works in practice. In this Element, the authors fill this gap by providing an in-depth discussion of compulsory voting rules and their enforcement in Australia, Belgium, and Brazil. By analysing comparable public opinion data from these three countries, they shed light on citizens’ attitudes toward compulsory voting. The Element examines citizens’ perceptions, their knowledge of the system, and whether they support it. The authors connect this with information on citizens’ reported turnout and vote choice to assess who is affected by mandatory voting and why. The work clarifies that there is no single system of compulsory voting. Each country has its own set of rules, and most voters are unaware of how they are enforced.

The strength and direction of the association between Christian religion and support for radical right-wing parties is strongly debated. On the one hand, there is work that shows that in Western European countries with a strong Christian democratic party…

This book examines changes in voters’ electoral choices over time and investigates how these changes are linked to a growth in electoral volatility. Ruth Dassonneville’s core argument, supported by extensive empirical data, is that group-based cross-pressures lead to instability in voters’ choices. She theorizes that when citizens’ socio-demographic characteristics and their membership of social groups do not consistently push them to support one party, but instead lead them to feel cross-pressured between parties, their voting decision process lacks constraint. Voters who are group-based cross-pressured are less likely to feel an attachment to a party, and have less guidance when assessing the state of the economy, when taking positions on issues, or evaluating leaders. The different factors that influence voters’ choices, as a result, do not add up to strengthening a preference for one specific party but instead lead a voter to consider different parties. To test this argument, the book makes use of election survey data from eight established democracies that allow the study of voting behaviour and its correlates over several decades. These data are complemented with data from the European Election Studies project and from election study panels. The book shows that group-based cross-pressures are an important source of instability as they affect the extent to which citizens’ voting decision process is structured. This is evident from the fact that cross-pressured voters are more ambivalent between parties, make their voting decision later, and are more likely to switch parties from one election to the next.

How do party positions in a multidimensional space affect party identification? This article argues that when parties take consistent ideological positions across dimensions, they clarify their brand, fostering party identifications. An analysis that uses data from the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey provides evidence for this argument. The results also indicate that the effect particularly holds for the less educated and politically less interested. In addition, ideological inconsistency affects individual parties? electoral appeal, as parties that take different positions on two dimensions tend to have a smaller partisan base. The results provide important insights into how multidimensional party competition shapes the development of party attachments.

When asked to place themselves on a left-right scale, men and women tend to take different positions. Over time, however ideological gender differences have taken a different form…