Comparing Democracies : Elections and Voting in Global Perspective

Elections have undergone radical changes in recent decades, not only in the United States but throughout the world. Electoral systems have experienced major reform in many countries including Italy, Israel, and Japan, and new parties have changed the face of competition in Germany, France, and Belgium. The emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and Latin America have also established new party systems with competitive elections. Integrating and synthesizing the most recent research in the field of elections, Comparing Democracies offers selections from a team of renowned international scholars writing on their areas of specialty. Contributors provide a cross-national study comparing elections in a number of democracies and discussing key topics associated with the study of elections including electoral laws, campaign finance regulations, media communications, and voter turnout.

This prestigious volume is an invaluable addition to the literature on elections and voting behavior, comparative democracy, and area studies. It will also serve as a standard reference for graduate students in comparative politics.

Richard G. Niemi is Don Alonzo Watson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester, where he has taught for forty-five years and has served as department chair, associate dean for graduate studies, and interim dean. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1967. Professor Niemi has been a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Lund (Sweden) and at the University of Iowa. In 2007–2009 he was president of the American Political Science Association’s Section on State Politics and Policy. He is a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of numerous works on political socialization, civic education, voting behavior, and various aspects of state politics. He has an ongoing interest in the Native Americans of upstate New York and Wisconsin, from whom he can trace a portion of his ancestry.

Pippa Norris is Director of the Democratic Governance group in the United Nations Development Programme in New York and the Maguire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Harvard University′s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Recent books include Sacred and Secular: Politics and Religion Worldwide (with Ronald Inglehart, 2004), Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior (2004), and Driving Democratization: What Works (2006). Norris, who is a political scientist, has served as an expert consultant for many international bodies including the UN, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, International IDEA, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the UK Electoral Commission.