Electoral Politics

An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Elections and Voting Behaviour Undeniably, the right to vote can be seen as the most important form of political participation. Understanding and explaining voters’ behaviour remains unsurprisingly a crucial and complex scientific task that benefits from an interdisciplinary perspective. Recently, there have been a number of innovations and substantial improvements on our understanding of the voters’ decision making process that led to the development of sophisticated models of electoral choice and to methodological advancements in social science research methods. Various approaches have emerged that shed light on the question how social stratification, attitudinal, identitarian, rational, emotional and contextual factors and their relationship with one another affect the citizens’ voting behaviour. We ask for panels and papers that use any or integrate several of these approaches for a better understanding of voting behaviour at the national or European level. This section as well encourages submissions demonstrating methodological advancements in measurement, data collection and/or data analysis in electoral research. In particular, we are interested in empirical, quantitative panels and papers that, for example, address the impact of class and religion or the relationship between party identification, candidate evaluations and issue orientations on voting behaviour. Furthermore, we welcome proposals analysing the influence of personality, emotions and effect on the decision making process as well as rational choice approaches that take into account the citizens’ political knowledge and their economic and retrospective evaluations. Panels and papers addressing contextual factors, such as the electoral and party system, political culture, media system/the interplay of old and new media and the impact of the Internet and social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) are also strongly encouraged. Contributions may deal with these or related topics in a longitudinal and/or comparative perspective as well as focusing on the dynamics in election campaigns. Methodological driven panels and papers may highlight advantages and limitations of recent developments in measurement (e.g. multiple measures, measurement error and latent variable models), complex data collection techniques (e.g. rolling cross-section surveys, survey and lab experiments, big data) and/or statistical data analysis (e.g. multilevel analysis, multiple group comparisons, network analysis). Due to this wide range of substantial and methodological issues, this section aims for pooling together young scholars from different sub-disciplines of political science as well as from related disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, economy and communication sciences, to benefit most by an interdisciplinary exchange and discussion. This Section proposal is officially supported by the ECPR standing group on Public Opinion and Voting Behaviour in a Comparative Perspective (http://www.povb-ecpr.org).