Consequences of Context: How the Social, Political and Economic Environment Affects Voting

Consequences of Context edited by Hermann Schmitt, Paolo Segatti and Cees van der Eijk aims to provide an extensive study of how context influences individuals’ electoral behaviour. The editors – leading experts in electoral behaviour from a comparative perspective – grouped a stellar collection of scholars relying on the True European Voter project as the launch pad for this collective effort. The result is brilliant and this book represents the better example to date of the recent shift that occurred in the field of voting behaviour from methodological individualism to a more subtle view according to which voters’ preferences are determined not only by individual characteristics but also by the characteristics of the context in which voters are embedded. Contexts are distinguished on the basis of conceptual distinctions (operationalized into variables) rather than their ‘proper names’, following Przeworsky and Teune (1970). Specifically, the focus is on the social, political and economic features of context and citizens’ electoral behaviour involves both their participation in elections and their decision of which party to vote for. However, the objective of this study is not to investigate whether citizens vote and for which specific party. Conversely, this book aims to answer the more fundamental question of how the traditional micro-level determinants of these behaviours interact with the social, economic and political features of the environment in which elections take place. This broad goal is systematically pursued across 12 chapters, relying on an integrated database of national election studies conducted in European countries in the second half of the 20th century. In particular, Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 12 are key to grasping the novelties and the main messages of this study. Indeed, the goal and research questions of the book are clearly stated in Chapter 1 by Segatti, Schmitt and van der Eijk. The thesis put forward in the book is that the key micro-foundations of voting (social background characteristics, sociopsychological attitudes, political inclinations and preferences about policy issues) tend to be the same everywhere. Yet, their relative importance varies across space and time. Clearly, the idea that context matters is not new. However, the novelty of this research (and hence its merits) concerns the variety of contextual characteristics considered, the type of contextual effect analysed and how the comparability problem of vote choice is addressed and solved.