No abstract

Party system nationalization is a crucial aspect of political competition. The territories of Eastern Europe have often been characterized by outstanding levels of territorial heterogeneity. However, during and after World War II ethnic cleansing and forced migration resulted in more homogeneous nation states, and these trends were significantly reinforced by bureaucratic, centralized communist rule. I present a systematic empirical assessment of party and party system homogeneity or heterogeneity in post-communist Eastern Europe and will discuss some major macrosociological and institutional factors determining the degree of party and party system nationalization such as the political consequences of social diversity and political cleavages, legacies of the communist regimes, electoral systems, and federalism.

Economic voting is a key explanatory factor for the short-term variation of vote choice, party competition and electoral volatility. This article applies the well-established literature on economic voting to the analysis of European Parliament elections. In theoretical terms, it focuses on a forward-looking selection model and probes the difficulties of signal extraction in the multilevel context of European Union politics. In methodological terms, hierarchical mixed logit models are used so as to explore the magnitude and the determinants of economic voting in the 2004 and the subsequent 2009 EP elections. Although the EU has acquired significant economic policy domains from the Member States, and therewith effectively blurring political responsibility for economic policies, this analysis demonstrates that voters are nevertheless able to extract competence signals and cast an economic vote.

Substantial empirical evidence suggests that voters cast their ballot not only by considering the different policy positions of parties or candidates, but also appear to pull candidates/parties they prefer closer to their own ideal position ('assimilation') while pushing candidates/parties they dislike, farther away ('contrast'). These effects are called 'projection effects'. We illustrate that voters' perceptions of policy positions of candidates/parties are contaminated by non-spatial considerations. Building on data from the EES series, we empirically demonstrate that projection effects are substantively meaningful and statistically significant in elections to the European Parliament. We moreover distinguish between unsystematic projection bias that only depends on the closeness to a specific candidate or party and systematic projection bias that is also affected by party-, voter-, and context-specific determinants.

No abstract