Daniele Caramani |
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| The Nationalization of Politics |
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| The Formation of National Electorates and Party Systems in Western Europe | |||
| 349 S., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004 | |||
| ISBN 0-521-82799-X | |||
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Abstract
This comparative and long-term in-depth analysis studies the macro-historical process of the nationalization of politics. Using a large wealth of newly collected and unexplored data on single constituencies in 17 West European countries, the analysis reconstructs the territorial structures of electoral participation and support for political parties, as well as their evolution since the mid-nineteenth century from highly territorialised politics of early competitive elections toward nation-wide alignments. It provides a multi-pronged empirical analysis through time, across countries, and between party families. The inclusion of all the most importan social and political cleavages (class, state-church, rural-urban, ethno-linguistic, and religious) allows to assess the nationalising impact of the left-right dimension that emerged from the National and Industrial Revolutions, and the resistance of pre-industrial cultural and centre-periphery factors to national integration. State formation, institutional, and socio-political mobilisation models are combined with actor-centered explanatory factors to account for key evolutionary steps and differences between national types of territorial configurations of the vote.
Contents
| List of Tables | ||
| List of Figures | ||
| Abbreviations and Symbols | ||
| Preface and Acknowledgements | ||
| Introduction: Homogeneity and Diversity in Europe | ||
| Part I | Framework | |
| 1. | The Structuring of Political Space | |
| 2. | Data, Indices, Method | |
| Part II | Evidence | |
| 3. | Time and Space: Evidence from the Historical Comparison | |
| 4. | Types of Territorial Configurations: National Variations | |
| 5. | The Comparative Study of Cleavages and Party Families | |
| Part III | Towards an Explanation | |
| 6. | The Dynamic Perspective: State Formation and Mass Democratization | |
| 7. | The Comparative Perspective: Nation-Building and Cultural Heterogeneity | |
| Conclusion: | From Territorial to Functional Politics | |
| Appendix 1: | Party Codes | |
| Appendix 2: | Territorial Units | |
| Appendix 3: | Computations | |
| Appendix 4: | Country Specificities | |
| Appendix 5: | Sources | |
| References | ||
| Index | ||
The author
Daniele Caramani is a research professor at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (University of Mannheim). He holds a Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence, and has taught at the universities of Geneva, Florence, and Bern. In 2000-2 he was Vincent Wright Fellow in Comparative Politics at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. He is the author of the book and CD-ROM Elections in Western Europe since 1815 (2002).