ABSTRACT
A quotation from a 1960s folk song may seem like an odd way to begin an essay on party system change in the 1990s, but Bob Dylan’s refrain, once an anthem of the American civil rights movement, captures the ways in which thinking about party systems and voting behaviour has changed. Thirty years ago we thought of party systems and the voter alignments which sustained them as immutable features of the landscape. That is no longer the case. Political scientists are less surprised than before when voters in successive elections fail to replicate past choices. The need to explain changes has generated new foci, such as recent emphases on anti-party sentiment. However, the implications of such phenomena for party systems and when and how they change remain uncertain.
