Russell Dalton

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Center for the Study of Democracy

According to media pundits and numerous scholars, the American public is deeply split into rival camps that intensely dislike each other and their political views. Many liberals don't understand conservatives and project their worst images on them; many conservatives act similarly. Social media can sometimes seem like a war zone. Political intolera...

West European party systems have undergone a systematic realignment of party policy positions over the past several decades. The traditional economic cleavage that initially structured many of these systems is still important, and economic issues continue to define voters’ interests and needs. In addition, a new cultural cleavage has emerged, consi...

A foundation of democracy is the equal participation of its citizens in the political process. Equal voice is a prerequisite of equal democratic influence. This chapter argues that two trends are increasing the social status biases in political voice across most established democracies—and discusses the implications of this trend. The general decre...

This forward to "Leaders without Partisans" (2021) updates the trends on the decline of party identification in advanced industrial democracies. We show that partisanship is systematically weakening and discuss the causes and consequences of this trend.

There are mounting claims that increasing ideological polarization is reshaping democratic party systems with important effects on the functioning of electoral politics, the correlates of voting choice, turnout, and even the representativeness of government. Yet, our knowledge of what causes party system polarization is still developing. The primar...

The current debate on the vitality of affluent democracies often cites the changing patterns of citizens’ political participation as signs of this malaise. Fewer citizens are voting, and more are turning toward contentious and more direct forms of participation. What are the consequences? I describe the participation patterns in affluent democracie...

Reflecting on the articles in this special issue of European Union Politics, this essay first asks whether EU scholarship has sufficiently conceptualized and measured what it means to identify with the European Project and/or the European Community. The evidence in this special issue indicates that many citizens now have attachments to Europe, albe...

Political behavior research persistently questions the ability of the average citizen to make voting choices that accurately represent their political views. We argue that voters’ choices should be judged by the outcome of the choices, and not the decision-making process. The representation gap measures the policy agreement between voters and their...

A long intellectual tradition links the different historical experiences in Canada and the United States (U.S.) to continuing contrasts in their political cultures. New evidence from contemporary public opinion polls highlights more cultural similarities between nations than differences. In broad value priorities, Canadians and Americans are more s...

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings in POLITICAL REALIGNMENT book. The book studies the realignment of voters and political parties in affluent democracies beginning in the 1970s and through to the 2010s.

This is the concluding chapter to THE PARTICIPATION GAP. It reviews the evidence of the widening social-status gap in political participation in affluent democracies, and discusses the implications of these trends.

As surely as the planet is steadily warming, political change is in the air. This special issue of AJCP features five essays by Germany, US, Japan, and Korea-based scholars devoted to the theme of Changing Political Cultures. The last quarter century has been a period of dramatic political change in many Asian nations, and scholarship has tried to...

Political theorists maintain that citizens’ representation through elections is the cornerstone of democracy. However, many analysts claim that a deficit in democratic representation exists within the European Union. This research examines the ideological match between voters and their party using the 2009 European Election Study. Aggregate agreeme...

Political trust – of citizens in government, parliament or political parties – has been centre stage in political science for more than half a century, reflecting ongoing concerns about the legitimacy of representative democracy. This Handbook offers the first truly global perspective on political trust and integrates the conceptual, theoretical, m...

Societal and institutional conditions create incentive (or disincentive) structures that can influence levels of participation (direct effects) and who participates (contingent effects). This chapter examines how constitutional structures, party system characteristics, and income inequality shape participation patterns. Consensual political institu...

The participation gap arises from two contrasting trends. Voting turnout is generally declining, especially among citizens with lower social status. At the same time, more people are participating in civil-society activity, contacting government officials, protesting, and using online activism and other creative forms of participation. These non-el...

In this study of the breakdown of traditional party loyalties and voting patterns, prominent comparativists and country specialists examine the changes now occurring in the political systems of advanced industrial democracies. Originally published in. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available pr...

In their classic, The Civic Culture, Almond and Verba (1963) define the ideal democratic citizen as an allegiant, trustful, and modestly participatory person. This ideal has shaped how scholars think about consolidated democracies as well the process of democratic development. In contrast, we argue that a new model of assertive citizenship spreads...

The U.S. presidential elections of 2008 and 2012 were a coming out party for Big Data applications in electoral studies. The Obama campaign developed a model of identifying individual voters that guided their campaign strategy to a successful outcome. This essay considers whether this model is exportable to elections and other aspects of political...

Party identification (PID) is defined as an early-socialized, enduring, affective, psychological identification with a specific political party. It was detected by some of the first empirical studies of electoral choice in the United States. PID receives such importance because it can structure a person's view of the political world, provide cues f...

Issue congruence between citizens and policy makers should be one of the central aspects of a democratic process. This study uses the 2009 European Election Study to compare the views of citizens and party elites on a diverse set of domestic policy issues and overall Left-Right identities. We find very high levels of congruence for Left-Right posit...

Is environmental action waxing or waning? Using the environmental modules of the International Social Survey Program from 1993, 2000, and 2010, two dimensions of environmental activism are described: environmental political activity and conservation behavior. Political activity has generally decreased, but in contrast, conservation behavior has bec...

Still today, The Civic Culture by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba counts as one of the most influential studies in comparative politics. The opus was pathbreaking because it formalized a model to describe the political culture of a nation and applied this model cross-nationally in five countries. As Sidney Verba (2011) has recently suggested, The C...

This book re-evaluates Almond, Verba, and Pye's original ideas about the shape of a civic culture that supports democracy. Marshaling a massive amount of cross-national, longitudinal public opinion data from the World Values Survey Association, the authors demonstrate multiple manifestations of a deep shift in the mass attitudes and behaviors that...

Approximately fifty years ago, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963) published The Civic Culture, followed soon after by Sidney Verba and Lucian Pye’s (1965) Political Culture and Political Development. The importance of these two classic studies cannot be overemphasized. They widened the political culture approach into a global framework for the...

This book re-evaluates Almond, Verba, and Pye's original ideas about the shape of a civic culture that supports democracy. Marshaling a massive amount of cross-national, longitudinal public opinion data from the World Values Survey Association, the authors demonstrate multiple manifestations of a deep shift in the mass attitudes and behaviors that...

Most new democracies face a challenge of reshaping the political culture to support the new democratic political order. This can often be a long-term process, complicated by the Realpolitik of governing in a new political (and often economic) system. One of the mechanisms of cultural change is generational change. New generations socialized after a...

Partisan ties in Germany have been weakening over the past three decades, which is changing the landscape of electoral politics. In contrast to a recent article by Dassonneville et al. in this journal, this article argues that a generational decline in partisanship is contributing to this dealignment trend, and virtually all of the new independents...

Implicit in theories of democratic elections is the idea of change—or at least the potential for change. Elections provide the opportunity for citizens to change their party preferences and thus alter the course of government. In addition, political parties can change their programmatic positions to attract new voters. Our research asks how much pa...

IanMarsh and RaymondMiller, Democratic Decline and Democratic Renewal: Political Change in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 383pp. - Volume 14 Issue 4 - Russell J. Dalton

Gee! I';ve Never Spent $5.5 Million Before:1. The Six Fallacies of NSF Proposal Writing - Volume 31 Issue 1 - Russell Dalton, Randolph Siverson

This book reevaluates Almond, Verba, and Pye's original ideas about the shape of a civic culture that supports democracy. Marshaling a massive amount of cross-national, longitudinal public opinion data from the World Values Survey Association, the authors demonstrate multiple manifestations of a deep shift in the mass attitudes and behaviors that u...

Most new democracies face a challenge of reshaping the political culture to support the new democratic political order. This can often be a long-term process, complicated by the Realpolitik of governing in a new political (and often economic) system. One of the mechanisms of cultural change is generational change. New generations socialized after a...

In this book, a group of leading scholars analyzes the functioning of modern democracies by focusing on two basic principles: political representation and policy congruence. Drawing on recent survey data from a variety of national and international research projects, they demonstrate how political representation works and mostly leads to a fair deg...

The concept of party identification is central to our understanding of electoral behavior. This paper builds upon the functional logic of party identification and asks what occurs when more Germans manage the complexities of politics without needing to rely on habitual party cues—what we label as Apartisans. We track the distribution of party mobil...

Although many scholars agree that social interactions within traditional social groups build social capital, there is less consensus on the benefits of virtual interactions on the Internet. The authors compare the activity of Americans and Australians based on a common battery of social network interaction questions. Their findings suggest that vir...

How does democratic representation work? The linkage between the public and the political decision makers is one of the essential topics for the study of democratic political systems. Most research views elections and political representation as a discrete decision-making process. This paper suggests that democratic representation is a continuing,...

Although many scholars agree that social interactions within traditional social groups build social capital, there is less consensus on the benefits of virtual interactions for political engagement. Our research examines how interpersonal social group activity and virtual activity contribute to two dimensions of social capital: citizen norms and po...

Although political development depends on many factors, an important component is the social and political values of the public. For the first time in human history, we have systematic evidence on some aspects of public opinion for the vast majority of nations in the world. These tend to focus on the cultural prerequisites for democracy, the develo...

Public-opinion research ranges from political attitudes to understanding family life in sociology to consumer confidence surveys in economics. This article covers some of the major resources for studying and understanding opinions on political topics in the United States and other affluent democracies. It describes the major books on the content an...

G Bingham Powell's core intellectual contribution to the study of politics has been to help us understand fundamental normative tradeoffs that are inherent to institutional choice in democratic political systems. The tradeoffs involve dimensions of political performance of central concern in the discipline, including political violence, political p...

The linkage between the public and the political decision makers is one of the essential topics for the study of democratic political systems. Most of the previous literature views elections and political representation as a discrete decision-making process. This paper suggests that rather than a discrete, point-in-time choice, democracy is based o...

An established literature in electoral studies maintains that the electoral system and other contextual factors shape the incentive structure for voters, and thereby influences individual electoral behavior. This chapter describes a theoretical framework for differentiating between various types of contextual effects on individual citizens. It also...

A large body of electoral studies and political party research argues that the institutional context defines incentives that shape citizen participation and voting choice. Based on the unique resources of the Comparative Study of Electoral System surveys, this volume provides the first systematic comparative analysis of how and why cross-national d...

Democracy presumes that elections give citizens an opportunity to evaluate the policies of the incumbent government and make judgments about the desired course of government in the future. This chapter examines how the public's political orientations, based on the Left- Right scale, influence their voting choices. We then consider how the instituti...

This chapter reviews the findings of this book and discusses their implications for the study of voter behavior. It argues that the effect of political institutions on voter behavior is typically indirect and contingent and that the most promixate contextual influences are typically different dimensions of the electoral supply in the form of party...

The conventional wisdom in political communications research is that the media play a dominant role in defining the agenda of elections. In Bernard Cohen's words, the media do not tell us what to think, but they tell us what to think about. The present article challenges this conclusion. We present data on media coverage of the 1992 presidential el...

Few aspects of politics have been as variable as partisan politics in the two decades since German unification. In the East, citizens had to learn about democratic electoral politics and the party system from an almost completely fresh start. In the West, voters experienced a changing partisan landscape and the shifting policy positions of the esta...

German unification was primarily a policy and economic challenge to unify two fundamentally different socio-political systems. In addition, it was a cultural challenge to unify two political cultures that had widely divergent histories. This article examines some of the basic aspects of cultural divide that were created by German unification. We fi...

Who Counts as an American? The Boundaries of National Identity. By Theiss-MorseElizabeth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 240p. $80.00 cloth, $24.99 paper. - Volume 8 Issue 1 - Russell J. Dalton

Political protest is seemingly a ubiquitous aspect of politics in advanced industrial societies, and its use may be spreading to less developed nations as well. Our research tests several rival theories of protest activity for citizens across an exceptionally wide range of polities. With data from the 1999–2002 wave of the World Values Survey, we d...

The Oxford Handbook of Political Behaviour examines the role of the citizen in contemporary politics, based on articles from leading scholars of political behaviour research. What does democracy expect of its citizens, and how do the citizenry match these expectations? The recent expansion of democracy has both given new rights and created new resp...

‘We are neither Left nor Right, we are out in front’ was the mantra of the environmental movement in the 1970s and early 1980s. This research examines the relationship between the traditional left/right economic cleavage and the environmental cleavage in structuring party competition in advanced industrial democracies. It begins by discussing the t...

This article examines the debates on political behaviour that are most visible in scholarly literature. These debates can be found throughout this book. The debates on mass belief systems and communication are first examined, followed by modernization and democratization of political culture. Political participation and the importance of public opi...

Previous research claims that the number of parties affects the representation of social cleavages in voting behavior, election turnout, patterns of political conflict, and other party system effects. This article argues that research typically counts the quantity of parties and that often the more important property is the quality of party competi...

A growing chorus of scholars laments the apparent decline of political participation in America, and the negative implications of this trend for American democracy. This article questions this position - arguing that previous studies misdiagnosed the sources of political change and the consequences of changing norms of citizenship for Americans' po...

During the last third of the twentieth century, the American political system underwent a process of democratic expansion and institutional reform that rivaled the populist era reforms early in the century (Cain, Dalton, and Scarrow 2003). This democratic transformation included reforms of the electoral system: direct primaries for presidential ele...

Some skeptics have asked whether ordinary people possess an understanding of democracy that allows them to evaluate it as a form of government. Our research yields three generalizations about popular understanding of democracy. First, even in new democracies, most people can offer a definition of democracy in their own words. Second, most people th...

Macroeconomic forces have influenced aggregate citizen support for European integration in the past, but no study analyzes historical data beyond the early 1990s. This gap is lamentable, because public support for integration has moved in precisely the opposite direction that past research would predict. We analyze data on support for the EU during...

The concept of party identification is central to our understanding of American electoral behavior. This research builds upon the functional logic of party identification and asks what occurs if citizens become better able to manage the complexities of politics without relying on habitual party cues. Using the data from the American National Electi...

P olitical parties are widely seen as “a sine qua non for the organization of the modern democratic polity and for the expression of political pluralism.” The manner in which parties articulate political interests largely defines the nature of electoral competition, the representation of citizen interests, the policy consequences of elections—and u...

The alignment of parties within a party system shapes the nature of electoral competition, the process of representation, and potentially the legitimacy of the system. This article describes the distribution of parties and the levels of party polarization in the party systems of East Asian democracies. We examine the public's perceptions of party p...

Party identification, the psychological bond between citizens and a political party, is one of the central variables in understanding political behavior. This article argues that such party ties are also a measure of party system institutionalization from the standpoint of the public. We apply Converse's model of partisan learning to 36 nations sur...

East Asia is one of the most dynamic areas of political change in the world today-what role do citizens play in these processes of change? Drawing upon a unique set of coordinated public opinion surveys conducted by the World Values Survey, this book provides a dramatically new image of the political cultures of East Asia. Most East Asian citizens...

East Asia is one of the most dynamic areas of political change in the world today-what role do citizens play in these processes of change? Drawing upon a unique set of coordinated public opinion surveys conducted by the World Values Survey, this book provides a dramatically new image of the political cultures of East Asia. Most East Asian citizens...