A Changing Electoral Politics in Western Democracies: Comparing the 2017 British Election to France, Germany, the United States, and Southern Europe within the Comparative National

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

The system of stable and consensual democracy in Britain is fraying at the edges. Anti-establishment populist political movements are on the rise, the traditional bases of party support have shifted, the public is deeply divided on many issues, most visibly Brexit, and Scotland is threatening a second independence referendum. However, these kinds of startling developments in political behavior and party system structure are not unique to Britain. Rather, they seem to be symptomatic of changes in many other established western democracies. This project proposes a study of British voters in the June 8, 2017 general election. That enterprise is an interesting topic in its own right. It also provides an opportunity to compare voting behavior in one country with that in seven other western democracies. The project is a part of the larger Comparative National Election Project (CNEP), which consists of surveys on recent national elections in the United States, France, and four Southern European countries, along with an upcoming 2017 post-election survey in Germany. The CNEP's common core survey design allows for systematic comparison across the eight cases. The CNEP survey in Great Britain will produce significant impacts by leveraging data collection from seven other western democracies, and through a collaborative network of country and cross-national election experts. The project holds the potential to shed insights on factors that can help strengthen democracy, encourage citizen participation and engagement, improve political communication, and address negative consequences resulting from political polarization. The team will disseminate data and findings widely. The investigators plan to publicize their findings to the public via media interviews, university publicity, essays on such platforms such as The Conversation and the Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog, white papers, and community talks. A survey of voters in the British general election on June 8, 2017 provides the opportunity for theoretically-driven comparative research examining contemporary voting behavior in the four largest (or core) western democracies: the United States, France, Germany, and Great Britain, all of which have held national elections within the a year of each other. Parallel surveys of the 2016 presidential election in the United States and the May 7 second-round French presidential election have been completed, and a parallel survey of the September federal legislative elections in Germany is in the works. These studies all utilize the common core questionnaire that has been at the center of 49 post-election surveys in 27 countries over the past three decades under the auspices of the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP). Use of a common questionnaire and the availability of four CNEP surveys of elections recently held in southern Europe greatly facilitates comparative analysis. The strength of the proposed project is the systematic comparative analysis it allows of voting behavior across these eight western democracies, at least three of which have undergone substantial party-system realignment in recent years. Additional analytical insights concerning certain core CNEP concerns, such as attitudes toward democracy, will be gained by selective comparative analysis of these eight political systems with several semi-democratic countries (e.g. Turkey) that have been surveyed in the last three years using the core CNEP questionnaire. The primary aim of the research is to seek to explain the fundamental challenges to established patterns of voting behavior and the structure of party systems that emerged in recent years. The team does so focusing on factors such as responses to economic stress, changing patterns of political intermediation, demand for and satisfaction with democracy, and political polarization. Beyond enabling analysis of British voters in 2017, the CNEP British survey will have a strong multiplier effect by leveraging data collection from the 3 core western democracies and 4 southern Europe countries, as well as by drawing upon a network of country and cross-national election experts. The outcomes are expected to include a volume charting new patterns of electoral politics in core western democracies and southern Europe, papers and peer-reviewed publications analyzing the major underlying factors impacting stability and change in party support in the core western democratic countries and the public release of the British dataset after an embargo period.