A new conventional wisdom characterizes the comparative study of electoral politics. Social cleavages, once a stabilizing factor of electoral behavior in Western Europe, are on the wane. Voting decisions have become individualized and old social cleavages have been superseded by new value-related cleavages. This article challenges that view as an exaggeration. Social cleavages have not disappeared and are not in universal decline, as demonstrated by an examination of data from seven countries from 1975 to 2002. Religious-secular voting is mostly stable, while class voting shows an unambiguous decline in only some of the countries under study. Further, neither rising levels of cognitive mobilization nor a dissemination of postmaterialist value priorities can account for these changes in class voting. The exaggeration of limited changes to general trends seems to rest on a disregard of the effects of party competition on patterns of electoral behavior. I suggest that further research should focus on the effects of parties' electoral strategies on the electoral relevance of social cleavages.

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Quantitative comparative social scientists have long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Adding to these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that standard maximum-likelihood (ML) methods yield biased point estimates and severely anti-conservative inference with few upper-level units. In this article, the authors seek to rectify this negative assessment. First, they show that ML estimators of coefficients are unbiased in linear multilevel models. The apparent bias in coefficient estimates found by Stegmueller can be attributed to Monte Carlo Error and a flaw in the design of his simulation study. Secondly, they demonstrate how inferential problems can be overcome by using restricted ML estimators for variance parameters and a t-distribution with appropriate degrees of freedom for statistical inference. Thus, accurate multilevel analysis is possible within the framework that most practitioners are familiar with, even if there are only a few upper-level units.

Abstract.  Political interest is usually depicted as an individual attribute that can be explained by referring to the resources and skills of citizens. The analyses presented here are based on a critical assessment of the explanatory power of these approaches in cross‐national and longitudinal comparisons. A contextual model is presented emphasising the relevance of distinct degrees of politicisation and economic development in different societies in addition to traditional sociodemographic factors (education, date of birth and gender) at the microlevel. The resulting multilevel model combines both individual and contextual factors to explain the cross‐national differences and changes in political involvement and apathy in Europe in the last three decades. The politicisation thesis, which states that the level of political interest among citizens is an increasing function of the relevance of societal and political arrangements in a society, is not supported by the empirical findings presented here. The most noteworthy conclusion is the remarkable disappearance of the impact of societal politicisation when the level of economic development of each country is included in multilevel models. The level of political interest, then, clearly depends on the level of economic development.

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