Identity, Competition and Electoral Availability: The Stabilisation of European Electorates 1885-1985 [Paperback]

This volume is an exceptional achievement. Bartolini and Mair offer a theory of electoral stability in European democracies that covers most European democracies between 1885 and 1985. The volumes powerful argument, encyclopedic data base, conceptual richness, and methodological sophistication place it at the top of the reading list for those who would study European electorates.Bartolini and Mair have produced an impressive study in its historical breadth and empirical methodology. Some of the spectres haunting electoral research remain. But in assembling and analyzing this impressive body of evidence, Bartolini and Mairs book significantly enriches the study of European electoral history.For those interested in larger patterns of electoral persistence and change among West European electorates, Bartolini and Mair's work is absolutely required reading. This is an extremely ambitious book, one that seeks to chart patterns of stability and instability across this century of mass politics; to assess what these patterns imply with regard to the hold of traditional cleavages; [and] to explain variance in these patterns through a variety of different factors . . . (p. xviii). The authors accomplish this task principally by their compelling use of an impressive collection of electoral data representing the results of 303 elections from thirteen West European countries spanning a century of mass politics (1885-1985). This is an exciting book, whose findings are bound to refashion the debate about the shape of the West European electoral landscape.The authors examine patterns of electoral persistence and change in Western Europe between 1885 and 1985.The question of whether Western party systems were becoming more unstable and electorates more volatile had already become central to the study of modern European by the end of the 1970s. Much of the literature at the time stressed how Western Europe was experiencing a phase of party breakdown, dealignment and decay, and hl“