Book reviews Book reviews Daniele Caramani, The Europeanization of Politics: The Formation of a European Electorate and Party System in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015; xviþ350 pp.: ISBN 978-1-107-54460-4, £21.99 (pbk) Reviewed by: Lorenzo De Sio and Vincenzo Emanuele, LUISS University Rome, Italy DOI: 10.1177/1354068817742754 Few topics are more timely than the potential development of a genuine “political Europe,” in an age where the con- tinent is facing a number of challenges in a variety of policy domains: from migration to security, to the development of an integrated response to the economic crisis. But is this process really possible? Is a genuine Europe-wide party system even imaginable, with voters choosing between clear Europeanized alternatives? Daniele Caramani’s ambitious new book comes at the right time for this debate, in that it provides a systematic investigation (supported by an impressive amount of data) of the main precondition that might allow such a type of representation to emerge. In particular, its core focus is on the demonstration of a historical process of convergence between European party systems and electorates; and on tracing that such a process is not really related to European integration—in fact preceding it by some decades. The book’s claim is grounded in a long-term historical analysis (covering 713 elections spanning over 150 years of elec- toral politics across 30 European countries) clearly indebted to Rokkanian theory. In fact, the book develops the original intuition developed by Lipset and Rokkan (1967) that the variety of party systems they observed across Europe was produced by just two historical pro- cesses: the national and the industrial revolutions. Cara- mani, in a way, starts where they left off by showing that these common processes, producing common cleavages (although not always activated) in different countries, could not but foster the development of a common lan- guage for expressing political conflicts across Europe. The book is very rich in empirical information but, most impor- tantly, presents a great variety of types of data (aggregate electoral results; party manifesto data, survey data, and cabinet compositions) analyzed through different types of qualitative and quantitative tools (including various types of regression and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) applications). Comparing this book with the previous effort by this author on the nationalization of politics (Caramani, 2004), the theoretical framework is partly similar, but there is an impressive expansion in the breadth of data types and analysis techniques employed. The book is structured as follows. Part I includes two chapters presenting the main research questions, the theo- retical framework and the research design. Part II proceeds then to a thorough empirical analysis, grounded in what perhaps is the methodological key to the book: the concept of party family as a Europe-wide equivalent of a party at the national level. The grouping of different national parties into Europe-wide party families (p. 73) allows the author to reuse similar quantitative tools as those employed for his previous book on the nationalization of politics on a Europe-wide scale. On these grounds, part II investigates five different dimensions of party system and electorate convergence: homogeneity (Chapter 3), the distribution of votes to different party families across Europe; uniformity (Chapter 4), the presence of common electoral swings for the same party families in different countries; correspon- dence (Chapter 5), the overlap (or not) between electoral results in national versus European Parliament (EP) elec- tions (which might show the emergence of a separate, new EP party system); cohesion (Chapter 6), the level of ideo- logical similarity emerging within each party family, both at the party and at the electorate level; and closure (Chapter 7), the cross-country uniformity of the coalition formulas employed in cabinet formation (also in terms of their policy orientations). The interpretation of the results provided by the author highlights a historical process of convergence: Through the decades, party families tend to receive increasingly similar vote shares across countries; party families’ swings appear to progressively synchronize; electoral results in national and EP elections tend to overlap (thus rejecting the emer- gence of a distinct EP party system); party families tend to become more ideologically uniform in terms of their policy preferences (although this does not happen among electo- rates , where an increasing divergence is registered instead); and government composition formulas (and the Party Politics 2018, Vol. 24(1) 90–96 ª The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav journals.sagepub.com/home/ppq