This is a systematic presentation of Danish political attitudes and voting behaviour. Based on a study of the country's 1994 election and interviews with 2000 voters, the book also draws on the results of previous elections and surveys of Danish political attitudes and voting choices during the past ten to 20 years. The book describes the political development, seen from the perspective of the voter, of a country that has attracted international attention several times: in reluctant support of NATO and in the European Community referendum. The authors describe the origin and history of the Danish party system, before analysing the issue of declining class voting and the rise of a new 'middle class', issues of generational change, and concern about immigration and the environment.

In our poll-driven age, political attitude surveys have become something of an academic industry. Researchers have proposed numerous models to explain the relationship between a particular issue and voter behavior, but there is no consensus on which approaches work best. Issue Voting offers a welcome overview of the various models in use today, their strengths and their shortcomings. In the early days of democracy, issues played a leading role in shaping American and Western European party systems. Liberal parties were formed explicitly to combat privilege, conservative parties to defend the military or the monarchy, socialist parties to champion unions, agrarian parties to campaign for the redistribution of land. By the time the first election studies came out in the 1940s, however, issue voting was of minor importance. Instead, the vote of the ordinary citizen reflected group norms - class, ethnic, religious and geographical norms - and the main factor in voting behavior was party identification, followed by candidate identification. In the early 1970s, evidence emerged of a surge in issue voting, and since then, political writers have proposed many models to describe its mechanisms. Yet their suggestions tend to be found in either professional articles that focus on some isolated aspect of issue voting, or single-election studies, a chapter of which sets forth some ad hoc model for the occasion. This volume provides a sorely needed overview of the approaches available. Ole Borre shows how the different models highlight consistency, position and issue distance, salience, valence issues and performance. He keeps the statistics simple, illustrating the various approaches with recent British and Danish election data and favoring linear regression whenever possible. Issue Voting will be invaluable to political scientists and modern historians trying to make sense of this quintessential democratic phenomenon.

This work contains the first comprehensive study of Nepalese voters. It is based on hour-long interviews with 1000 Nepalese voters spread over the Himalayan kingdom. The survey was conducted immediately after the general election in May 1991, the first election to take place under the multiparty system which was introduced after the mass uprising in April 1990. This study registers the political attitudes prevailing in Nepalese society, the voters' perceptions of political problems, their evaluations of party differences, and their participation in the election campaign and eventual partisan choice.