Parties and Societies: Social Clevages and Voting Behavior in Compatative Perspective

该项目对自1945年以来23个资本主义民主国家的社会分裂--特别是基于阶级、宗教、种族/民族和性别的社会分裂--对投票行为的影响进行了大规模的比较分析。它考察了近年来一直备受争议的四个问题。第一，作为预测个人投票行为的因素，社会裂痕的重要性是否在下降？第二，政党战略、问题和态度差异以及社会、经济和政治背景是否解释了每一种分裂随着时间的推移而发生变化的模式？第三，哪些个体因素和宏观因素解释了乳沟重要性的跨国差异？第四，这些变化对主要政党的选举联盟有什么影响？为了回答这些问题，该项目创建了一个原始数据集，其中包含自1945年以来在23个国家进行的200多项调查的汇总信息。调查人员对数据进行重新编码，以提供关于每个受访者的班级位置、宗教、性别、政治态度和投票行为的跨国可比信息。然后，他们将调查数据与国家数据结合起来，这些数据包括种族语言和宗教异质性、女性在劳动力中的比例、经常去教堂的比例、社会流动性水平以及福利国家支出。最后，他们将大多数国家的政党平台上的信息添加到数据集。研究人员不仅使用这些数据来解决有关基于社会分裂的投票的变化和国家差异的实质性问题，还将这些数据提供给其他对比较投票行为感兴趣的研究人员。

This project conducts a large-scale comparative analysis of the impact of social cleavages - especially those based on class, religion, race/ethnicity, and gender - on voting behavior in 23 capitalist democracies since 1945. It examines four questions that have been the subject of much controversy in recent years. One, are social cleavages declining in importance as factors predicting individual voting behavior? Two, do party strategies, issue and attitudinal differences, and social, economic, and political contexts explain the patterns of change over time across each cleavage? Three, what individual and macro-level factors explain cross-national differences in the importance of cleavages? And four, what has been the impact of these changes on the electoral coalitions of major political parties?To answer these questions, the project creates an original data set containing pooled information from over 200 surveys done in 23 countries since 1945. The investigators recode the data to provide cross-nationally comparable information on each respondent's class location, religion, gender, political attitudes, and voting behavior. They next combine the survey data with national figures on ethnic-linguistic and religious heterogeneity, percentage of women in the labor force, percentage of regular church attendees, levels of social mobility, and welfare state expenditures. They lastly add information to the data set on party platforms for most of the nations. The investigators not only use the data to address the substantive questions about changes and national differences in social cleavage-based voting, but also make the data available to other researchers interested in comparative voting behavior.