The goal of this book is to describe and explain the formation over a century and a half of nationwide electoral alignments, party systems, and cleavage constellations in Western Europe. The progressive transformation of politics from local into national is often referred to as the “nationalization of politics” – or “electoral politics” – that is, the formation of national parties and party systems that parallels (but is not simply a reflection of) the creation of a national community through the expansion of state administration, the building and integration of national identities, and the process of social and geographical mobilization triggered by the Industrial Revolution. This macrophenomenon of “democratic integration” is analyzed over time and across countries and is broken down for all cleavages – state–church, center–periphery, rural–urban, and the class cleavage – as well as for the major party families that emerged from them.

When I began working on this project, it soon became clear that the necessary data would not be easily available. The comparative and historical analysis of the territorial structures of electorates, party systems, and voting behavior in Europe requires electoral data at the constituency level, and very soon in the course of the analysis, it also became clear that a long-term historical perspective would be necessary to analyze earlier periods of modern elections – that is, the periods of formation of national party systems and electoral competition.