Until the last quarter of the 20th Century, Western party systems appeared to be frozen and stability was generally taken to be the central characteristic of individual-level party choice. But during the 1970s and 1980s, in a spasm of change that appeared to occur in all countri…
An international team of political scientists explore the reasons for the dramatic shifts in voting patterns in 16 Western countries since 1970. They investigate the connections between social divisions and party choice and the manner in which these links have been changing sinc…
"This is a longitudinal study, extending over nearly a generation, of changes in voting behaviour that is as fully cross-national as it was possible to produce at the time. Its findings enabled the authors to break away from conventional explanations for electoral change to arri…