The Nationalization of Politics: The Formation of National Electorates and Party Systems in Western Europe

by Daniele Caramani

• ISBN13: 9780521827997
• ISBN10: 052182799X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-03-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In an in-depth comparative and long-term analysis Daniele Caramani studies the macro-historical process of the nationalization of politics. Using a great wealth of new and unexplored data on single constituencies in seventeen West European countries, he reconstructs the territorial structures of electoral support for political parties, as well as their evolution since the mid-nineteenth century from highly fragmented politics in the early stages toward nation-wide alignments. Caramani provides a multi-pronged empirical analysis through time, across countries, and between party families. The inclusion in the analysis of all the most important social and political cleavages - class, state-church, rural-urban, ethno-linguistic and religious - allows him to assess the nationalizing impact of the class cleavage that emerged from national and industrial revolutions, and the resistance of preindustrial cultural factors to national integration. Institutional and socio-economic factors are combined with actor-centered patterns and differences between national types of territorial configurations of the vote.

Table of Contents

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: national and industrial revolutions

7. The comparative perspective: social fragmentation and territoriality

Conclusion: from territorial to functional politics.