“It is complicated.” With these words, Hans-Dieter Klingemann warned me, with typical German understatement, of what was ahead when I first mentioned plans for this book over a (not very good) dinner in Turin. The words have echoed in my mind on countless occasions since then, sticking rather like an annoying few bars from a television commercial. He did not say impossible. He did not say impractical. He said complicated. “Yes,” I said casually, “of course.” But I didn't really listen. I had just completed another book that covered 193 nations. The core dataset for this volume covers just more than 30. It was a little puzzling to me that so few others had ever attempted a book comparing voting behavior across many different types of societies, including older and newer democracies. But with the arrogance of ignorance I plunged ahead. After all, courtesy of the hardworking team at the University of Michigan, I had access to the first integrated cross-national dataset bringing together election studies from Australia to the Ukraine. But as I soon discovered, complicated it was, and still is. But it was also, I happily discovered, fascinating, stimulating, and challenging.

This book would not have been possible without the work of all those who contributed toward the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), especially Virginia Sapiro, Phil Shively, David Howell, Karen Long, and all the staff who worked on this project at the Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.