Gabor Toka

• Central European University

I provide links to most of my work (papers, books and datasets) at http://www.personal.ceu.hu/departs/personal/Gabor_Toka/ The fields covered include comparative voting behavior and political attitudes, party systems, elections, political communication, mass media.

The paper analyses the connections between elite and mass opinion in the European Union. It considers both the ways in which mass publics use heuristics supplied by political elites to form their EU opinions, and the ways in which political elites respond to the opinions of the mass publics they represent. The paper employs data from simultaneously...

This chapter starts by describing the features of domestic, national-level and European Union-level politics that the previous chapters have sought to illuminate. It then summarizes the fundamental Europe-wide trends that have been observed in recent decades concerning the basic attitudinal and behavioural phenomena analysed in the previous chapter...

This chapter examines generalized support for the EU rather than attitudes towards specific institutions and policies. Theories about its origin are subjected to more comprehensive empirical tests than previous analyses attempted, using time-series cross-section data covering all member states from the 1970s to 2007. The dynamic relationship betwee...

This book provides a broad overview of the main trends in mass attitudes towards domestic politics and European integration from the 1970s until today. Particularly in the last two decades, the 'end of the permissive consensus' around European integration has forced analysts to place public opinion at the centre of their concerns. The book faces th...

This chapter presents the volume, its fundamental motivation, and contents. It argues that the end of 'permissive consensus' and the entry of mass publics as relevant actors in the dynamics of European integration require a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of how attitudes towards domestic and European politics are linked, especially in the c...

The central concern of this book is to know and describe how far EU 'legal' citizens feel that they are actually part of a functioning European political system and how much they think of themselves as EU citizens. The chapters report evidence of the levels of European identity, sense of EU representation and preferences for EU policy scope among E...

This chapter explicitly models reciprocal causal effects, providing a comprehensive and integrated account of EU citizenship attitudes on EU support. While preceding explanatory chapters are all based on single-equation models, here a system of equations is estimated in which instrumental variables are employed to sharpen the understanding of the p...

This chapter presents our dependent variables. It discusses the ways in which the various dimensions of European citizenship and of engagement have been theorised and measured. Citizenship is mapped onto the three theoretical dimensions of citizenship (identity, representation and scope of government), thus showing that citizens' attitudes are clea...

This book is not an edited collection of interconnected but intrinsically separate essays. Rather, it is a cohesive piece of research that should read as a unified study both in terms of the way we have built and tested our hypotheses, and in the way concepts are measured and models developed. The first chapter defines the book's core substantive f...

This chapter deals with the impact of citizenship attitudes on popular support for European integration, an issue that has been extensively investigated in previous research. The distinctiveness of the new analysis in this chapter is that it allows a comprehensive empirical testing of a wide set of theoretical claims advanced in the literature that...

This paper identifies possible micro-mechanisms for the operation of Lipset and Rokkan's freezing hypothesis and suggests that their effects do not disappear altogether with the decline of cleavage politics but are sustained by any persistent social or attitudinal divide between the electorates of different parties. A multilevel analysis of survey...

In 2004 the European Union was enlarged with ten new member states, eight of them previously communist states in Central and Eastern Europe. This enlargement was without precedent in the history of the Union and its predecessors. It is still to be seen how well the institutions as well as the citizens of the Union are able to cope with the conseque...

This paper examines cross-national variance in the impact of public and commercial television on citizens' political knowledge level and whether and how that variance may be related to differences in the content of public television broadcast. Multilevel models are used to link micro-level information on citizen knowledge from the European Election...

We investigate differences in the factors influencing citizens’ votes between elections conducted in established and new democracies using data collected at the 2004 European Parliament elections, comparing 7 former communist countries with 13 established democracies. Despite contrary expectations in some of the extant literature, voters in ‘new’ d...

The aim of this book is threefold. First to put in one place for the convenience of both scholars and practitioners the basic data on redistricting practices in democracies around the world. Remarkably, this data has never before been collected. Second, to provide a series of short case studies that look in more detail at particular countries with...

This paper provides a new empirical test of the common sense proposition that a better informed electorate helps producing greater collective welfare. The innovation lies in an arguably more adequate measurement of both the independent and the dependent variable than those found in previous studies. The data come from the cross-national post-electi...

We examine two sources of political inequalities that seem inevitable in elections, supposedly the most egalitarian and most fundamental of modern democratic processes. The first stems from the fact that not everyone is equally likely to vote, and the second from unequal political information levels, which may make some groups of citizens better ab...

This chapter analyses various aspects of party politics in Hungary and demonstrates that the country developed genuine party government,in the decade after transition to democracy in 1990. However, while their overwhelming control of the whole political process is taken for granted the parties fulfill relatively few social functions and tend to be...

This chapter examines public support for the EU in Hungary between 1991 and 2003. Our argument is that support for EU membership is likely to have multiple roots given the complexity of the EU and citizens’ limited information about it. Chief among them are individuals’ preference for characteristics associated with the Union and its individual mem...

The paper empirically tests the proposition that because of the unequal social distribution of politically relevant resources, some groups of citizens may be less successful in expressing their specifically political preferences in the vote than others. Hence, the electoral arena may give different people different degrees of political influence ev...

Several previous analyses of aggregate data found that left-wing parties may win a much bigger share of the vote if turnout in elections were higher. This finding is hard to reconcile with the findings of previous survey-based analyses about the usually rather weak relationship between socio-demographic variables on the one hand, and vote choice an...

The paper empirically tests the proposition that because of unequal social distribution of politically relevant resources, some groups of citizens may be less successful in expressing their specifically political preferences in the vote than others. Hence, the electoral arena may give different people different degrees of political influence even w...

This paper discusses the media and political contexts of campaign effects in the newer democracies of Central Europe, and draws upon examples from the 1994, 1998 and 2002 Hungarian national elections, as well as recent elections in Romania. Research (by the authors) on the 1994 and 1998 Hungarian elections found important campaign effects though th...

This paper discusses the media and political contexts of campaign effects in the newer democracies of Central Europe, and draws upon examples from the 1994, 1998 and 2002 Hungarian national elections, as well as recent elections in Romania. Research (by the authors) on the 1994 and 1998 Hungarian elections found important campaign effects though th...

Abstract The paper empirically examines an oft-assumed but rarely studied consequence of cleavage mobilization, i.e. the activation by political parties of various social divisions as determinants of vote choice. In the literature on voting, the hypothesis is best known from

Since the 1970s, partly in reaction to the somewhat bleak assessment by the Columbia school and Campbell et al. (1960) of the individual citizen’s political competence, a whole generation of specialists in political behavior has tried to show that ordinary people can make good use of their vote. Their studies suggest that citizens intelligently int...

The authors analyse the evolution and the strength of the political parties as actors in the processes of democratic transition and consolidation in Hungary. Their starting point is that the political parties in transitional countries are faced with the same rivals in the political arena as the parties in the West: powerful interest groups, the inc...

This book is the first in the ‘Beliefs in government’ series, and examines the general consensus that the relationship between citizens and the state in Western European societies have undergone a fundamental change over the last few decades, to the detriment of representative democracy. Addressing the problem from the citizen's perspective, it ide...

In order to test the suggested decline of the family we compare sibling resemblance in the life-chances of five Hungarian cohorts born during the twentieth century. Similar studies in Germany and the Netherlands show less sibling resemblance in younger cohorts. However, one might argue that this trend towards the decline of sibling resemblance cann...

This paper seeks to explore whether different organization and penetration of mass media create different chances that the electorate will successfully emulate fully informed voting behavior. In other words, we are asking if there is something in the structural characteristics of media systems that is particularly helpful or particularly detrimenta...

This chapter distinguishes between four main periods in the history of electoral research in Hungary. Until 1990 Hungary only had brief encounters with competitive mass democracy, and consequently scholarly examinations of elections were sporadic. An impressive amount of survey data were collected in the run-up to first parliamentary elections of t...

The paper offers a cross-national empirical analysis that connects two lines of arguments about the determinants of election outcomes. The first posits that because of correlations between socio-economic status and some socio-demographic variables on the one hand, and both vote choice and electoral participation on the other, election results may b...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Megjelent a Törések, hálók, hidak: Választói magatartás és politikai tagolódás Magyarországon (szerk. Angelusz Róbert és Tardos Róbert) című kötetben; Budapest: DKMKA, pp. 17-64. E tanulmánykötet megírása olyan kutatókat hozott össze egy közös vállalkozásra, akik valamennyien hosszú évek óta foglalkoznak a magyar választói magatartás vizsgálatával....

This chapter discusses basic concepts and models in the analysis of party-based representation through the electoral arena and provide cross-national data about levels of citizen participation (turnout as well as other modes of participation), identification with parties, electoral volatility, party system fragmentation and polarization, and the im...