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Electoral Volatility and Party Decline in Western Democracies: 1970–1995

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  • Andrew J. Drummond

Abstract

In 1970, Richard Rose and Derek Urwin published a seminal piece on the stability of party support in Western democracies, ‘Persistence and Change in Western Party Systems Since 1945’. Everywhere they looked, established parties seemed to reflect stability rather than change, lending credence to the notion that party systems were ‘frozen’. Numerous subsequent studies, however, have produced mixed results. Part of what seems to be fueling this debate lies in the disparate measures researchers use to gauge stability. In this update of Rose and Urwin's study, I address the issue of comparable results by maintaining the same data source and methods they used to gauge the stability of party support, extending the study to the present. The results indicate that party system instability is on the rise throughout much of the West since 1970, with statistically significant increases seen in Scandinavia and across all regions combined. Furthermore, the parties which seem to be experiencing the most change are not only the newest parties – as the frozen cleavages thesis might predict – but also those parties formed during the interwar period, the large majority of which showed much greater stability in 1970.

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  • Andrew J. Drummond, 2006. "Electoral Volatility and Party Decline in Western Democracies: 1970–1995," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 54(3), pages 628-647, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:polstu:v:54:y:2006:i:3:p:628-647
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2006.00617.x
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    Cited by:

    1. Ufen, Andreas, 2008. "The Evolution of Cleavages in the Indonesian Party System," GIGA Working Papers 74, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    2. Sinisa Hadziabdic & Lucio Baccaro, 2020. "A Switch or a Process? Disentangling the Effects of Union Membership on Political Attitudes in Switzerland and the UK," Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(3), pages 466-499, July.
    3. Gavoille, Nicolas & Verschelde, Marijn, 2017. "Electoral competition and political selection: An analysis of the activity of French deputies, 1958–2012," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 180-195.
    4. Hadziabdic, Sinisa, 2023. "Turning no tides: Union effects on partisan preferences and the working-class metamorphosis," MPIfG Discussion Paper 23/2, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    5. Luana Russo, 2014. "Estimating floating voters: a comparison between the ecological inference and the survey methods," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 48(3), pages 1667-1683, May.

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