Mapping the political space in Lithuania: the discrepancy between party elites and party supporters

Foreign Policy Preferences and Vote Choice Under Semi-Presidentialism

“…In order to control for the main cleavage in Lithuania, I add a variable that measures attitudes towards the Soviet era (1life in Soviet times was better, 5it was not better). This is a strong control for foreign-policy considerations, as previous research found that the Soviet cleavage is associated with attitudes towards Russia (Ramonaitė 2020). Lastly, to account for the popularity contest argument, I use three variables measuring sympathy towards the candidates: to what extent respondents like or dislike them (scale from 0, 'strongly dislike', to 10, 'strongly like').…”

“…However, there is one important exception: the major centre-right party TS-LKD commands a minority of loyal partisans. The main political cleavage (Ramonaitė et al 2014; Ramonaitė 2020), is structured around the evaluation of the Soviet period: Lithuanians with negative attitudes towards the Soviet period tend to vote for the right, whereas voters with neutral or positive evaluations lean to the centre-left.…”

“…Regarding the role of foreign-policy preferences in (electoral) politics, Lithuania has similarities to Taiwan (Wang and Cheng 2015), as in both countries the central question regarding foreign policy relates to a historical and antagonistic relationship with a large, neighbouring authoritarian country (China in the case of Taiwan and Russia for Lithuania). Research on Lithuanian voters (Ramonaitė 2020) shows that, although the general ideological structuring of party electorates (regarding sociocultural and socioeconomic left and right) is rather loose, attitudes concerning Russia settle into one coherent dimension. Analogously to the cleavage of the Soviet past, right-wing voters more often see Russia as a threat and favour strengthening national defence while the left-leaning voters tend to downplay the Russian threat.…”

Who spends more? Party Ideology and Public Spending in 16 Post-Socialist Countries

“…The second are the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union, which emerged as a winner in the 2016 election and has been leading the ruling coalition since. However, despite their official title, these two parties are often described as populist, nationalist or conservative, marginalising the environmental aspects of their party programs (Auers 2012;Ramonaite 2020). The socially conservative values of these parties are different from the core ideology of green parties in the rest of Europe, sometimes even resulting in their mutual alienation.…”

Coalition Politics in Central Eastern Europe

“…Firstly, coalition bargaining and governance become liable to innovations that are introduced by the new parties and instances of populism, widely practiced even by the mainstream parties. As for new parties and instances of populism (Valentinavičius 2017;Ramonaitė 2020;Jastramskis 2020), the personalization of politics and the ailing partisan content of policies have produced implications for political competition and for the very premises of coalition formation and generally for democratic accountability.…”