Increasingly short-term? An Age, Period Cohort Analysis on Preferences to Vote in The Netherlands, 1986-2006

Political behavior is altering fundamentally across Western Europe. Theories of dealignment describe how the bonds between citizens and political parties are eroding and partisanship weakens. This process of change is apparent from declining party membership rates, a decrease in levels of conventional political participation and greater uncertainty among voters when choosing between parties on election day (Dalton, 1984; Dalton et al., 2000; Van Biezen et al., 2012). The findings of dealignment pose a challenge to the classical theories on voting behavior. The Michigan school scholars for example, found partisanship to be of foremost importance in the vote choice process. A citizen‟s party identification is conceptualized as being at the beginning of the funnel of causality towards the vote choice (Campbell et al., 1960). Therefore, the process of dealignment touches upon the essence of the Michigan understanding of voting behavior. In a European context, it was the cleavage theory of Lipset and Rokkan (1967) that was expected to be the most important theoretical framework, explaining electoral behavior. Because of the loyalty of voters belonging to certain social groups to the parties affiliated to these groups, European party systems could be considered frozen. Dealignment causes these loyalties to be eroding and makes voting behavior considerably less stable than it was back in the 1950s and 1960s (Franklin et al., 2009; Dalton, 1984). As a consequence, the socio-structural model of voting behavior has become outmoded and seems to be no longer representative of how citizens choose what party to vote for. Traditional theories of voting behavior are clearly challenged, which raises the question if we can still understand and explain how citizens choose what party to vote for (Rosema, 2004)status: publishe