Since the heyday of cleavage voting in the 1960s and 1970s, the majority of studies presents evidence of a decline in cleavage voting-caused by either structural or behavioural dealignment. Structural dealignment denotes changes in group size responsible for a decrease in cleavage voting, whereas behavioural dealignment concerns weakening party-voter links over time. A third phenomenon posited in this article is the collective voting abstention of certain (social) groups, here referred to as 'political dealignment', which results in a new type of division of voting versus abstention. The purpose of this article is to examine the three underlying mechanisms for the decline in social class and religious cleavage voting across four Western countries (Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States) over the last 40-60 years using longitudinal post-election data. The results prove a strong presence of political dealignment and increasing turnout gaps regarding both the class and religious cleavage. Furthermore, whenever a decline in cleavage voting is present, it is mainly caused by changes in the social groups' behaviour and less by changing social structures in a country.

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Media provide the public with information related to the European Union which may alter individuals' perceptions, ultimately resulting in changes in performance evaluations of the EU. Knowledge gains may be an important mediator in this process. We present data from a study in the context of the 2016 Bratislava summit in which the Heads of the Union's governments discussed the outcome of the Brexit vote and the EU's future. A panel survey assessed the relationship between exposure to media content, event-related knowledge gains, and changes in attitudes towards the European Union. Our results show that when attending to news about the summit, citizens attain event-related knowledge which negatively affects EU performance evaluations. We discuss our findings in light of the role media play in informing the European citizenry.

The share of voters participating in national elections from abroad is evergrowing. Despite this, expatriates constitute one of the most understudied groups of electors. Some existing analyses have shown that expatriates support different parties than voters residing at home. However, the reasons for this effect remain in the dark. In this article, we test common electoral theories—socio-structural, socio-psychological, and issue voting—and their relevance for voters at home and abroad. Additionally, we test if differences in voting behaviour are due to compositional or behavioural reasons. In line with previous studies, we show that expatriates support other parties, in the Swiss case left parties, than voters at home. We further show that this gap cannot be explained by the different composition of the expatriate community but rather by their different behavioural motivations. Expatriates more often base their vote choice on their social class and religious beliefs. Partisanship voting and, to some extent, issue voting are less important in the expatriate community. The findings are based on the Swiss National Election Study 2011 and additional interviews conducted among Swiss residing abroad.

While electoral research usually distinguishes voters from abstainers, in the Swiss direct democratic context one needs to take into account a third category of citizens, the selective voters, who decide anew at each vote whether they will participate or not. This article offers an investigation of this common but under‐researched form of participation. To that end, we take advantage of a unique data‐set linking official turnout data with survey data. Our results show that selective voters constitute the bulk of the electorate. While they form a heterogeneous group in terms of socio‐demographic characteristics, selective voters lean more towards abstainers than towards permanent voters with respect to political variables. We argue that this is not necessarily bad news in terms of democratic theory.