Stein Rokkan became one of the central figures of European comparative politics and political sociology in the post-war decades. Citizens, Elections, Parties remains the most complete guide to Rokkan's work up to 1970, and it is for this that Rokkan is most widely known today.
The core question at the heart of this seminal work is what explains the political behaviour of citizens. The book brings together a series of studies, some conceptual and theoretical, others empirical and statistical, of processes of political development in industrialising and industrialised societies.
The fourteen studies presented in the volume focus on three central themes in the comparative sociology of national development: first, the extension of citizenship to hitherto underprivileged strata of each territorial population; second, the mobilisation of the new masses through the institutionalisation of elections and the formation of parties and popular movements; and third, the reactions of the mobilised masses to the alternatives presented to them by the inherited national regime, by the parties, and by the new media of communication.
Rokkan's work, as represented in Citizens, Elections, Parties, remains alive today; his analysis of the structural underpinnings of citizen behaviour was innovative and highly ambitious in its day and still remains relevant, with many of the questions he raised still not receiving an adequate answer.
This edition includes a new introduction by Alan Renwick.
Stein Rokkan was born in 1921 on the Lofoten archipelago in the far north of Norway and raised in the nearby town of Narvik. From these unlikely beginnings, he went on to become president of the International Political Science Association (1970–73), vice-president of the International Sociological Association (1966–70) and chairman of the European Consortium for Political Research (1970–76), of which he was also a co-founder. He was president of the International Social Science Council associated with UNESCO (1973–77) and chairman of Nordisk Forbund for Statskundskab (1975–76). Seymour Martin Lipset described him shortly after his death in 1979 as 'the pre-eminent political sociologist' of his generation. He remains widely cited in diverse literature today.
Angus Campbell was an American social psychologist best known for his research into electoral systems and for co-writing The American Voter with Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald E. Stokes.
Per Torsvik was a Norwegian political scientist and media scholar, best known for co-founding the Department of Press Research at the University of Oslo.
Henry Valen was a Norwegian political scientist and expert in electorate behaviour. He was the author of a large number of works including Political Parties in Norway and and the ECPR Press title Electoral Change: Responses to Evolving Social and Attitudinal Structures in Western Countries.
Alan Renwick is an expert in the mechanisms through which citizens can participate in formal politics: particularly in electoral systems, referendums, and deliberative processes such as citizens' assemblies.
His research is comparative: besides the UK, his recent projects have included all European democracies as well as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, and the United States.
He was recently the chair of the Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland.
