Ruling the Void by Peter. Mair Read Free Book Online

consistency and stability over time in the distribution of partisan preferences. Those citizens who continue to vote in elections are clearly still engaged with conventional politics, however marginally. As popular involvement fades, however, and as indifference grows, we can expect that even these citizens who do continue to participate will prove more volatile, more uncertain and more random in their expressions of preference. If politics no longer counts for so much, then not only should the willingness to vote begin to falter; so also should the sense of commitment among those who continue to take part. Choices are likely to prove more fickle, and to be more susceptible to the play of short-term factors. In practice, this also means that election outcomes are likely to prove less and less predictable. Electoral volatility is likely to increase; new parties and or new candidates are likely to prove more successful; and traditional alignments are likely to come under pressure. Hand in hand with indifference goes inconsistency.
    As with patterns in turnout, expectations of growing unpredictability in the balance of party support in national party systems in western Europe have been current for a number of years. Here too, however, the empirical record at the aggregate level has usually failed to confirm them. Thus while party systems in some countries did indeed experience a substantial increase in their levels of electoral flux through the 1970s and 1980s, others appeared to become even more settled than before, resulting in what was generally a ‘stable’ and relatively subdued level of aggregate electoral change across western Europe as a whole (Bartolini and Mair, 1990). For many observers, such findings proved puzzling, since the evidence from survey data in particular had suggested that in the 1970s the western democracies had already begun to experience symptoms of breakdown in their traditional electoral alignments and historic cleavage voting patterns (Dalton et al., 1983; Franklin et al., 1992). As it turned out, however, these undeniable changes at the level of individual behaviour did not seem to translate into equivalent shifts in the party balance at the aggregate level. Indeed, even by the end of the 1980s, aggregate electoral volatility on a European-wide basis remained relatively muted, while many of the traditional parties that had already dominated electoral competition in the 1950s or even earlier continued to be serious contenders. These older parties had certainly seen some of their aggregate support slipping away to the benefit of new formations, but even by the end of the 1980s it was striking to see how much of their overall vote share they managed to retain.
    This is borne out by the mean levels of aggregate electoral volatility in the period from 1950s to the 1980s. The measure applied here is that originally proposed by Mogens Pedersen (1979), who calculated the level of volatility simply by summing the (aggregate) electoral gainsof all winning parties in a given election, or, which is the same thing, the (aggregate) electoral losses of all losing parties. It is, of course, a crude aggregate measure, and it may well underestimate the real level of vote switching – as measured by individual survey evidence, or whatever. As an aggregate measure, however, it has the advantage of being calculable for all elections, including those in the distant past as well as those in polities where survey data are either absent or unreliable. In any case, the point here is to note that by this measure, contrary to many expectations, levels of aggregate electoral volatility across the fifteen long-standing democracies in Europe scarcely changed between the 1950s and the 1980s: the west European national average fell from 7.9 per cent in the 1950s to 6.9 per cent in the 1960s, and then rose to just 8.9 per cent in the 1970s and in the 1980s. This was hardly the stuff of electoral earthquakes. That said, these