The Europeanization of Politics: The Formation of a European Electorate and Party System in Historical Perspective

Daniele Caramani

Sep 2015 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

In a broadly comparative, historical and quantitative analysis, this study reveals the unity of European electorates and party systems. Investigating thirty countries in Western and Central-Eastern Europe over 150 years of electoral history, the author shows the existence of common alignments and parallel waves of electoral change across the continent. Europeanization appears through an array of indicators including cross-country deviation measures, uniform swings of votes, the correspondence between national arenas and European Parliament, as well as in the ideological convergence among parties of the same families. Based on a painstaking analysis of a large wealth of data, the study identifies the supra-national, domestic and diffusion factors at the origin of Europeanization. Building on previous work on the nationalization of politics, this new study makes the case for Europeanization in historical and electoral perspective, and points to the role of left-right in structuring the European party system along ideological rather than territorial lines. In the classical tradition of electoral and party literature, this book sheds a new light on Europe's democracy.

About the author

Daniele Caramani is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Zurich. He holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, where he has also been a Jean Monnet Fellow. He has held positions at the University of Mannheim in Germany, the University of Birmingham in England, and the University of St Gallen in Switzerland. He is the author of Elections in Western Europe since 1815: Electoral Results by Constituencies (2000), The Nationalization of Politics (2004), and Introduction to the Comparative Method with Boolean Algebra (2009). He edited the textbook Comparative Politics, 3rd edition (2014) and regularly publishes in leading political science journals. He received the UNESCO's Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences in 2004 and the Data Set Award for the Constituency-Level Data Archive (CLEA) in 2012.