Citizens, Context, and Choice

How do institutions and electoral systems matter for citizens' electoral choices? This is the first systematic study that attempts to answer this question for contemporary democracies. The book assembles leading electoral researchers to examine citizen choice in over three dozen democracies surveyed by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. The results yield several unexpected findings with implications for electoral research and the design of democratic institutions. These researchers find that formal electoral institutions often matter less than characteristics of the party system that are separate from institutional design. In addition, the impact of context is often more indirect and interactive than the direct effects stressed in previous research. The results have the potential to reshape our understanding of how the institutional framework and context of election matters, and the limits of institutional design in shaping citizen electoral behavior.