Indifference and Alienation? An Analysis of the Choice Sets of European Electorates, 1989-2004

The literature on dealignment is rich and we already know a good deal of the causes and consequences of this important process of change in the political arena. A number of debates, however, have not been settled yet. The question of whether dealignment is driven by generational replacement for example and the hypothesis that cognitive mobilization causes dealignment still warrant investigation. While there is scattered evidence for both, robust findings in a wide set of countries is still missing. The limited traveling capacity of the concept of partisanship definitely hinders such an all-encompassing analysis. For this reason, the present paper suggests to look at an alternative indicator of how aligned voters are to parties; distributions of PTV-measures. We show that across Western Europe, these PTV-distributions indicate a trend towards more indifference towards parties but not more alienation from parties over time. Using these indicators in explanatory analyses, we find that the younger generations are less indifferent than the older generations, which goes against the theory of generational replacement. Additionally, we provide a test of the cognitive mobilization thesis. Using political interest as an indicator of political sophistication, we find that the middle interested are least indifferent towards parties and also most alienated from parties.status: publishe