Elinor Scarbrough

TL;DR: The British Election Study as discussed by the authors is the major data resource for investigating electoral behavior among the British electorate, and it has been subject to open critical review from within the political science community, yet, together with extensions such as the British Election Panel Study, it absorbs a considerable proportion of the resources available for British political research.

Abstract: The Beliefs in Government study is probably the most exhaustive analysis of mass political beliefs and attitudes carried out in the West. It is both intensive and extensive—intensive, because it analyses and reanalyses all the major comparative surveys of mass attitudes and beliefs and adds to these a good deal of country-specific material; extensive, because it covers as many West European nation states as the evidence allows. Since the region includes 17 countries, all different in some respects but all with a comparable West Europe background and family resemblance, it constitutes "God's natural laboratory" for political scientists. Some of the surveys go back to the 1960s, even to the 1950s in one or two instances, providing conclusions based upon the longest possible time-series and the broadest possible range of countries in Western Europe. The project involved 56 scholars from all parts of Western Europe and all working with crossnational timeseries data within an integrated research framework. The results of the research are surprising because they challenge widely argued theories of mass opinion and much of the conventional scholarly writing about citizen attitudes towards modern Western government. In the first place, the study underlines the need to guard against the overinterpretation of short-term data and limited comparative studies. Public opinion tends to fluctuate rapidly but superficially in the short run; only by examining long-term trends over a variety of countries is it possible to discern changes in bedrock attitudes. And, of course, public opinion on some issues varies between countries or moves in different directions. But since many postwar theories of public opinion are based on short-term evidence or on the evidence of a single country, they tend to fail the empirical test. For example, contrary to much of what has been said in the literature, political participation and voting turnout across West Europe as a whole has not declined. There is little to suggest increasing political alienation or apathy. Voting turnout has remained remarkably stable in the postwar period, and other forms of political participation have, if anything, tended to increase over the years. West European citizens have not withdrawn into political apathy and disillusionment; on the contrary, they participate more. What has changed, however, is the repertory of acceptable political action, which has broadened since the 1960s and 1970s to include a range of direct or uninstitutionalized forms of action—petitions, demonstrations, citizen initiatives, political strikes. As a result, the boundaries of legal and illegal direct action have tended to blur, a problem that may become more acute in the future. But while direct political action sometimes contains a flavour of expressive attitudes and behaviour, the instrumental mode prevails strongly, contrary to the claims of some theorists of postmodern politics. Similarly, despite major social, cultural, and economic changes, West European democracies have maintained a high level of political legitimacy, contrary to predictions about the coming of mass society, a legitimacy crisis, ungovernability and overload, and the subversive effects of new social movements and postmodernity. There are few signs of a declining faith either in the legitimacy of democracy as an abstract principle, or in the way democracy works in particular countries, or in the major institutions of society. Even the claim that support for the established political parties is on the wane is not generally confirmed across Western Europe, although there are certainly examples of this trend in some countries. The evidence shows that the electorate has not become apathetic or hostile; on the other hand, it seems to respond more quickly and directly than formerly. Equally, it seems, democratic procedures, institutions, and actors are also more flexible, adaptable, and responsive to rapid social, economic, and political change than many theories assume.

TL;DR: In this paper, contemporary societaldevelopments are considered in the light of three majortheories advanced to explain the emergence of welfare states in Western Europe: the logic-of-industrialism, the crisis of capitalism, and nation-building.