Mark N Franklin

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Trinity College Connecticut

In this chapter we attempt to adjudicate (i) between the major routes found in the literature (identity, habit, rational choice) through which voters might acquire the decision-making background relevant to them at election time, as well as (ii) the components of the actual decision (identities/habits, strategies, and culling of the choice set) by...

In this chapter we attempt to adjudicate (i) between the major routes found in the literature (identity, habit, rational choice) through which voters might acquire the decision-making background relevant to them at election time, as well as (ii) the components of the actual decision (identies/habits, strategies, and culling of the decision set) by...

This chapter builds on earlier work (Franklin 2022) that explored the mechanism tying the evolution of party choice at the individual level to evolving election-level turnout rates. It employs CSES surveys from 22 countries over the course of 3 to 5 elections. It builds on past findings that used error correction models to confirm the role of negat...

This chapter explores a mechanism at the party level of analysis that ties party choice at the individual level to election-level turnout rates. It employs survey and election data from 14 countries over 20-50 years. It builds on past findings that used error correction models to confirm the role of negative feedback in maintaining an equilibrium r...

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In the aftermath of a European Parliament (EP) election, there are normally two prominent aspects that receive attention by scholars and experts: the turnout rate and whether the Second Order Election (SOE) model proposed by Reif and Schmitt (1980) still applies. That model is based on the idea that, because EP elections do not themselves provide e...

In this chapter we attempt to adjudicate (i) between the major routes found in the literature (identity, habit, rational choice) through which voters might acquire the decision-making background relevant to them at election time, as well as (ii) the components of the actual decision (identies/habits, strategies, and culling of the choice set) by em...

Two quasi-mechanical forces push in different directions when we consider consequences of lowering the voting age to 16. On the one hand, lowering the voting age would provide votes to young adults still in school and living in their parental homes. These circumstances should (theory tells us) boost the turnout of those individuals not only at thei...

Ideological congruence between voters and governments is desirable, the wisdom goes, because it implies enactment of policies close to those preferred by voters. Party polarization plays a paradoxical role here: more polarization reduces voter-government congruence if parties making up a government move away from the center-ground where most indivi...

This chapter analyses the electoral results of the European Parliament (EP) Election of May 2019. We adopt a twofold strategy: first, we calculate the shares of votes for all the political parties that contested these elections and we then aggregate these results to the level of EP group. Thus, we simulate a single European constituency. This empir...

The analysis of issue politics has long suffered from a fragmentation between valence and positional conceptualisations, preventing the effective development of a general model of issue-based party competition. Building on an overview of the evolution of party competition in the Western world in recent decades, this article offers a theoretical dev...

50 authors from 30 different countries, and available exactly one month after the 2019 European Parliament election night! Edited by Lorenzo De Sio, Mark N. Franklin and Luana Russo for CISE-LUISS University Press (with the cooperation of Maastricht University), "The European Parliament Elections of 2019" is now available as a free download. Crow...

Why are party systems in modern democracies so essentially robust? We theorize patterns of electoral competition as the outcome of a struggle between entropy and structure. Forces of entropy entail idiosyncratic voting behavior guided by subjective evaluations, while forces of structure entail coordinated behavior emerging from objective aspects of...

European Parliament (EP) elections have been described as “midwives to new parties”, facilitating in many ways the birth of parties that fractionalize party systems and have knock-on effects for government formation. This chapter proposes a previously unmentioned mechanism that would “pump” support from new and previously non-voting individuals tow...

Drawing on the findings of the previous chapters, we assess whether it continues to be helpful for European Parliament (EP) elections to be termed “second order” and/or “second rate”. The 2014 EP elections were indeed still second rate and also predominantly second order. Being “about Europe”, which undoubtedly was also the case, does not make them...

Here we set the scene for the book, questioning the reasons for the phenomenal success of eurosceptic parties at the European Parliament (EP) elections of 2014 and considering the likely consequences. Above all, did these elections represent a new phenomenon, no longer “second order” in nature? We define this term and introduce a new term—“second r...

The financial crisis subjected the EU to its first truly serious stress test. A majority of citizens is now opposed to further integration. But party systems have barely adjusted, instead perpetuating traditional patterns of an evasive mainstream with Euroskeptic fringes. To explain this unexpected outcome we draw on . issue yield (De Sio and Weber...

Do elections to the European Parliament increase or at least sustain a higher level of diffuse support for Europe? This chapter confirms and extends previous research findings by demonstrating the manner in which the reverse is true. Based on a time-series analysis of diffuse support for Europe in twelve European Union member states (from 1985 to 2...

Why has turnout in European Parliament elections remained so low, despite attempts to expand the parliament's powers? One possible answer is that because little is at stake in these second-order elections only those with an established habit of voting, acquired in previous national elections, can be counted on to vote. Others argue that low turnout...

Accountability requires that voters be able to withhold support from a government or party or representative that, in their view, has failed to deliver promised or expected benefits – whether in terms of policies, programs or stances regarding matters of public concern. Accountability is thus incompatible with a degree of partisan loyalty that woul...

This volume provides an important update to our current understanding of politics and the internet in a variety of new contexts, both geographically and institutionally. The subject of e-democracy has morphed over the years from speculative and optimistic accounts of a future heightened direct citizen involvement in political decision-making and an...

Downs (1957) suggested that voters would be motivated to choose mainstream parties that were close to them in left-right terms, and researchers have assumed that the same preference for proximate parties would apply when considering issue locations. Indeed issues and left-right location have generally been seen as interchangeable theoretically, wit...

Often, social scientists are confronted with objects for which measurement proves to be either too limiting or unpersuasive. This chapter is about challenging such ubiquitous measures in order to create alternative measurements so as to progress the debate regarding one important political phenomenon: party choice. Those who study voting and electi...

The Issue Yield model predicts that parties will choose specific issues to emphasise, based on the joint assessment of electoral risks (how divisive is an issue within the party support base) and electoral opportunities (how widely supported is the same issue outside the party). According to this model, issues with high yield are those that combine...

It has long been realised that democratic governance requires a two-way flow of influence. Governments must be able to respond to what people want and people must be able to react to what governments do. These preconditions for democratic governance have been central to two research traditions on political representation. One of these, the responsi...

The Italian party system largely collapsed in the early 1990s, providing us with a natural experimental situation in which voters were confronted with new parties – indeed, with an entirely new party system. How did they react? This paper develops a number of expectations on the basis of existing theory and tests these expectations using a dataset...

This eBook contains some of the first fruits of a large collaborative project funded by the EU’s DG Research under their FP7 Programme: an “infrastructure design study” whose ultimate goal is “Providing an Infrastructure for Research on Electoral Democracy in the European Union” – a title that gives rise to the unlovely acronym PIREDEU, used repeat...

Why has turnout in European Parliament (EP) elections remained so low, despite attempts to expand the Parliament’s powers? One possible answer is that because little is at stake in these second-order elections only those with an established habit of voting, acquired in previous national elections, can be counted on to vote. Others argue that low tu...

Midterm congressional elections happen in different contextual circumstances than on-year congressional elections. The president's party generally loses votes (and often seats) at such elections, a phenomenon known as “midterm loss.” To a comparativist's eyes, midterm congressional elections in the US are particular examples of what elsewhere are c...

This article reviews the sub-field of cleavage research – the sub-field within which this special issue fits. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the sub-field and characterises it as (with some shining exceptions) being prone to weak theorising, loose logic, and/or shaky methodology (sometimes all three at once). These three themes are pur...

This article concentrates on three areas in which American elections have features that are illuminated by voting behavior in countries with somewhat different features. These features are multiple elections, separated powers, and the locality rule. It also describes the aspects of electoral behavior: split-ticket voting, cycle of elections, and lo...

How can we understand the low turnout seen in the 2004 European Parliament elections? One possibility would be that new member states were ‘just different’ either because of the post‐communist legacy in some of them or because of an unexplicated ‘low propensity to vote’ in some of those. This article explicates the low propensity to vote in some po...

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...

Cees van der Eijk and Mark Franklin Elections and Voters (Palgrave Macmillan 2009) Preface extract This is a book about the logic of representative democracy and about the role of the electoral process within this logic. We see elections as opportunities for strategic action on the part of voters and politicians, and we try to explain how electio...

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...

Quantification is one way of employing the scientific method to discover things about the world. In the social sciences we are trying to discover things about the social world, but the approach we use can still be regarded as scientific. The scientific approach attempts to abstract from the nuances and details of a story the salient features that c...

The referenda conducted in France and Denmark in 1992 to ratify the Maastricht Treaty are often seen as giving evidence of ‘true’ attitudes towards Europe. In this paper we dispute this assumption, presenting evidence that shows referenda in Parliamentary systems with disciplined party governments to be subject to what we call a ‘lockstep’ phenomen...

European elections provide unique opportunities for studying the complex interactions between elites and citizens in the interrelated spheres of domestic and European politics, partially because these elections link domestic and European politics. While their nature as second-order national elections makes European elections an integral part of the...

Conventional wisdom holds that the state of the economy is closely linked to the outcomes of elections: incumbent governments tend to be rewarded for good economic times and punished for bad ones. It has been suggested that the ‘subjective economy’ — people's assessments of the state of the economy — links actual economic conditions to support for...

Orientations toward European integration and toward the European Union figure prominently in many chapters of this volume. Chapter 4 focused on parties' orientations toward European integration, and on voters' perceptions thereof. Chapter 5 analyzed differences in supportive attitudes toward the EU, looking for explanations at contextual and indivi...

The idea that turnout responds to levels of public esteem for democratic institutions is deep seated and recurrent. Though it has been argued (Franklin 1999, 2004; Franklin, van der Eijk, and Oppenhuis 1996) that turnout reflects nothing of the sort-certainly not unless one first controls for other factors more immediately responsible for turnout l...

Economic conditions are said to affect election outcomes, but past research has produced unstable and contradictory findings. This book argues that these problems are caused by the failure to take account of electoral competition between parties. A research strategy to correct this problem is designed and applied to investigate effects of economic...

In recent years the theory of consumption cleavages has progressed far towards supplanting traditional explanations of voting behaviour resting on socialization and issue-based electoral choice. What is not often realized is that the new theory cannot readily coexist with traditional explanations. If consumption cleavage theory is right then much o...

As a dependent variable, party choice did not lend itself to analysis by means of powerful multivariate methods until the coming of discrete-choice models, most notably conditional logit and multinomial logit. These methods involve estimating effects on party preferences (utilities) that are post hoc derived from the data, but such estimates are pl...

Why do European elections look more like national elections in retrospect than in prospect? One possibility is that during the run-up to a European election party leaders appeal for the votes of their ‘normal’ supporters, and their success in these appeals gives rise to the ‘normal’ outcome of the campaign. To test this hypothesis two definitions o...

Recent research has demonstrated that voting is a habit that is learned (or not) during a formative period in the life of young adults. Learning to vote is costly, and the costs depend in part on the situation in which young adults find themselves during that formative period. It has been suggested that what matters primarily is the extent to which...

Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Recent research has shown that elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a ‘footprint’ of low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at su...

Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a ‘footprint’ of low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at subsequent elections. Elections t...

That citizens of European Union countries differ in their attitudes regarding Europe is a commonplace of political commentary. Some favor their country’s membership in the EU, others oppose it. Some, while thinking that membership is generally a good thing, feel that steps toward unification have gone far enough – or even too far. Others believe th...

this paper is to demonstrate the advantages of the use of this measure of electoral utility. Because we have utilities from each respondent for each of the parties in his/her political system we are able to simultaneously analyze party choice in a large number of countries. We will illustrate the advantages of this measure of party choice with a da...

Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a 'footprint' of low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at subsequent elections. Elections t...

Palle Svensson in this issue of EJPR has objected to the characterisation of Danish voters made by Franklin and others who, in various publications, expounded the thesis that on issues of low salience, referendum votes tend to follow party lines. Svensson finds evidence that the Maastricht Treaty was not an issue of low salience to Danish voters in...

Using survey data from all six countries where elections have been studied continuously since the 1960s, we examine the role of generational replacement in turnout change. Early electoral experiences leave an imprint on citizens who generally continue to vote or not vote just as they generally continue to support the same political party (or no par...

The study of voter turnout is bedeviled by a number of puzzles, some of which also are found in other areas of political research. Other topics, however, seldom see so many apparently intractable puzzles all at the same time. In this article I enumerate the puzzles and describe each of them briefly. My argument is that in studying voter turnout we...

In this article, we summarize some of the main findings and implications of the papers included in this Special Issue, and draw our own conclusions about the likely future of election studies.

This Special Issue is concerned with the ways in which election studies, as conventionally implemented by large scale sample surveys, are conducted. The authors of the Special Issue’s papers are all Principal Investigators for election studies, past and/or future, in various countries (mainly in Europe and the United States). The papers report on,...

The June 1999 elections to the European Parliament were the fourth to show lower turnout, suggesting to some a decline in support for the European project. This paper shows, however, that turnout decline has been built into the EC/EU enlargement process. In the first EP elections, voting was compulsory in 40% of participating countries; but no more...

this paper has been corrected for estimated changes in the ineligible portion of the U.S. voting age population (cf. Mackie and Rose 1991, 458)

Past research has strongly suggested that there is a relationship between economic conditions andelection outcomes, but attempts to find individual-level concomitants of these aggregate-level effectshave yielded inconclusive findings. This research is the first to look for effects of variations in realeconomic indicators (growth in GDP, changes in...

Overarching this book and its companion volume Political Representation and Legitimacy in the European Union (ed. Schmitt and Thomassen) is the theme of exploring political representation in Europe in a truly comparative context. A distinguished array of academic experts analyse the ‘views from within’ concerning European integration and the role o...

How severe a problem is what many call the ‘democratic deficit’ of the EU? Despite a voluminous theoretical literature dealing with this question, there is hardly any systematic empirical investigation of the effectiveness of the system of political representation in the EU, and of the legitimacy beliefs of EU citizens that spring from it. This boo...

Low electoral turnout is often considered to be bad for democracy, whether inherently or because it calls legitimacy into question or because low turnout implies lack of representation of certain groups and inegalitarian policies. Yet there would appear to be a straightforward cure for low turnout: make voting compulsory. Of the twenty-five countri...