Electoral behaviour is one of the most dynamic areas of study in the field of comparative politics today. A strongly emerging theme in recent years has been the need to set the study of voting behaviour in its wider context, that is to understand how the behaviour of the individual (non)voter is conditioned by the environment in which the election is occurring. The main motivation for this book is to respond to this need.

The Act of Voting examines voting - both the question of whether to vote (ie. electoral turnout) and who to vote for - in context from a range of...