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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.
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