Economic Voting in Postcommunist Eastern Europe

Abstract

This study tests the hypothesis that the replacement of incumbent promarket, prodemocracy governments with ex-communist parties in postcommunist East European elections was a function of the economic calculus of frustrated citizens at the ballot box. Using data from the Central and Eastern Euro-Barometer studies, this investigation adopts an individual-level approach to examine the degree to which economic assessments and unemployment influenced both proreform incumbent and ex-communist party voting intentions in Lithuania (1992), Hungary (1994), and Bulgaria (1994). The dominant impression that emerges from the logistic regression estimations predicting voting intentions is that despite strong expectations to the contrary, economic factors had at best a modest effect on party choice in these nations. These findings corroborate country-specific studies of electoral behavior in Eastern Europe that observe that the return to parliamentary power of ex-communist parties in these societies was not simply a function of economic voting.

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