Russell J. Dalton was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at UC Irvine. He has received a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Mannheim, a Barbra Streisand Center fellowship, German Marshall Research Fellowship and a POSCO Fellowship at the East/West Center. His scholarly interests include comparative political behavior, political parties, social movements, and empirical democratic theory. He is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Christopher J. Anderson is a team member of the Persistent Poverty and Upward Mobility theme project organized by Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences and the international collaborative project on Making Electoral Democracy Work funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. His research focuses on contextual models of politics that view political actors as nested in a variety of social, economic, and political environments that shape and constrain behavior. In particular, he studies how differences in macro-political contexts across countries shape people's cognition and action. He has long been interested in popular consent and inequality in democracies and has written on the popularity of governments, the legitimacy of political institutions, and the link between welfare states and citizen behavior. He is Professor of Government and Director of the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University.

The integrative new institutionalism approach of context, institutions and political behaviour makes the book very readable.

• PART I: INTRODUCTION ; PART II: ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION ; PART III: ELECTORAL CHOICE ; PART IV: ELECTORAL CHOICE AND REPRESENTATION ; PART V: CONCLUSION