Nationalisation of regional elections in Central and Eastern Europe

Schakel, Arjan H.

doi:10.1080/21599165.2015.1036034

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 41 publications

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“…Few authors concentrated on all Slovakian regions (Krivý 2002(Krivý , 2006Benkovičová 2006;Spáč et al 2016;Plešivčák 2017;Kováčová 2018;Marušiak 2018), whereas others focused only on electoral behaviour in specific regions. (Dolný 2014;Gregor 2015;Hrušovský 2015;Mikuš et al 2016;Buček -Plešivčák 2017) Finally, as regional elections can be seen as second-order elections (Reif -Schmitt 1980;Schakel 2015), it is important to verify the assumptions of strategic voting, as well as Duverger"s theory, also in elections of presidents of Slovakian regions (as second-order institutions), because some studies analysing voters strategic behaviour in the post-communist space (focused just on strategic voting in second-order elections) found significant inconsistencies to Duverger"s assumption, whether it was local elections in Romania held under the proportional system (Albescu et al 2012), or elections to the upper chambers of parliaments in the Czech Republic using the TRS (Hájek 2015) and Poland with the FPTP, respectively. (Maškarinec 2016) 3 This article tests the effects of FPTP in the 2017 elections of regional presidents by analysing precinct-level results, i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic Voting in Slovak Regional Elections of 2013 and 2017: Evidence for Duverger’s Law in Elections of Presidents of Regional Self-Government?

Maškarinec¹

2018

sociologia

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Duverger's Law in Elections of Presidents of Regional Self-Government? This article tests Duverger's law through an analysis of the 2017 elections of Slovakian regional presidents which were held under the new first-past-the-post (or single-member plurality) system, and comparison with results of the previous election of 2013 which used a tworound system (absolute majority runoff). The main aim of the article is to test the expectations of strategic voting in the context of the so-called second-order elections, under which regional elections can be classified. The results show that strategic voting was not a universal phenomenon under the plurality rule in 2017, as indicated by electoral results and party competition at the level of electoral precincts. In most electoral precincts, the character of electoral competition was not in compliance with theoretical expectations and two-party competition. More importantly, the introduction of FPTP, instead of TRS, should lead to increasing two-party competition and strategic voting, but the opposite was true. Competition at precinct level in 2017 went far away from the Duvergerian equilibrium, as two-party competition increased in only one out of eight regions, Trnava, compared to 2013. Finally, segmented Nagayama diagrams likely proved as the most suitable indicator of competitiveness and strategic behaviour, helping us identify the patterns, but above all, changes to the patterns, of electoral competitiveness between elections. Our research thus confirmed that the effect of electoral institutions (institutional structure) is contingent upon and (at the district, or precinct, level) inhibited by country-specific conditions, with potentially strong influence of the second-order character of the Slovak regional elections.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%