Cases and methods
This chapter presents the five cases. They are all wealthy Western European democracies. They feature quite a few similarities, concerning the evolution of turnout, electoral volatility, or the growing success of far-right parties. Yet, they also allow for some variation regarding their electoral systems, ranging from very majoritarian to very proportional and a resulting variety of party systems. Each country’s institutional setup and contemporary politics is briefly presented in turn. For each of the five countries, the chapter briefly discusses data availability and sources. For the five countries, we present the legislative agenda and the party agenda from the early 1980s to the late 2000s at least. Finally, we explain the choice of fixed-effects negative binomial regression, given the specific structure of the data and the goals of the study.