Citizens, Elections, Parties: Approaches to the Comparative Study of the Processes of Development

Stein Rokkan, with Angus Campbell, Per Torsvik, and Henry Valen

Following World War II, Stein Rokkan became one of the central figures of European comparative politics and political sociology, writing numerous papers, articles, and chapters. Yet Citizens, Elections, Parties was his only single-authored book. It remains the most complete guide to Rokkan’s work up to 1970, and it is the book for which Rokkan is most widely known today. The core question at the heart of this seminal work is what explains the political behaviour of citizens. The book brings together a series of studies, some conceptual and theoretical, others empirical and statistical, of processes of political development in industrializing and industrialized societies. The fourteen studies presented in the volume focus on three central themes in the comparative sociology of national development: the extension of citizenship to hitherto underprivileged strata of each territorial population; the mobilization of the new masses through the institutionalization of elections and the formation of parties and popular movements; and the reactions of the mobilized masses to the alternatives presented to them by the inherited national regime, by the parties, and by the new media of communication. Rokkan’s work, as represented in Citizens, Elections, Parties, remains alive today; his analysis of the structural underpinnings of citizen behaviour is innovative, highly ambitious, and still relevant, with many of the questions Rokkan raised remaining unanswered.

Related Subjects

• Business

About the Author

Stein Rokkan was born in 1921 on the Lofoten archipelago in the far north of Norway and raised in the nearby town of Narvik. From these unlikely beginnings, he went on to become president of the International Political Science Association (1970–73), vice-president of the International Sociological Association (1966–70) and chairman of the European Consortium for Political Research (1970–76), of which he was also a co-founder. He was president of the International Social Science Council associated with UNESCO (1973–77) and chairman of Nordisk Forbund for Statskundskab (1975–76). Shortly after his death in 1979, Seymour Martin Lipset described him as "the pre-eminent political sociologist" of his generation. He is widely cited in diverse literatures today.

top of page