Economics or History: Preferences of Croatian Voters in the 2016 Parliamentary Elections

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the determinants of election victory in the Republic of Croatia. The main hypothesis of the paper is that in the Republic of Croatia the events of the 1990s, i.e., the Homeland War, had a stronger impact on the winners of the parliamentary elections in terms of the economic performance of the local self-government units (LSGs). Due to the availability of data, we focus on the 2016 parliamentary elections, and we model the victory of the two leading parties in Croatia – the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – at the level of LSG. We develop a logistic regression model with the variable "election victory" at the LSG level as a dependent variable explained by the following variables: economic development at the LSG level, Homeland War covered LSGs, transparency of LSG budgets, election turnout, and government budget support to the LSGs. The results show that certain commonly accepted opinions, such as that voters in more economically developed LSGs vote more for the SDP on average, and that voters in war-affected LSGs vote more for the HDZ on average, have empirical confirmation.