The Development of Stable Party Support: Electoral Dynamics in Post‐Communist Europe

Abstract

What conditions help stable patterns of party support to emerge? Using pooled time-series cross-section data on election results from 15 East European democracies, the empirical analysis finds that (1) right after a regime change electoral volatility increases while the trend is reversed after democracy has endured for about a decade; (2) ethnic cleavages have no effect on stability while social cleavages affect electoral stability only during economic downturns; (3) both institutions and economic performance influence the stability of party support; however, the effect of the latter diminishes over time when democracies mature.1 Electoral volatility is measured by the formula provided by Pedersen (1983): V = |c i,t−1 − c i,t |/2, where V is volatility, c i,t is the vote share for a party i at a given election (t) and c i,t−1 is the vote share of the same party i at the previous election (t − 1).

The Political Economy of State Capture in Central Europe

“…In this light, the chronically high rates of voter volatility in these cases – between 20 and 60 per cent in each election between 1990 and 2010, where west European party systems are hitting a ‘spike’ if volatility exceeds 20 per cent (Dassonneville and Hooghe, , pp. 33–4) – is unsurprising, as is the steady rise in the effective number of parties at both the electoral and parliamentary levels through the same period, encouraging a vicious circle of non‐consolidation (Tavits, ). The only solution to such serious instability is an effective war on particularism and this battle is necessarily domestic and civil, as Dimitrova and Buzogány () illustrate so well.…”

Sila nestálosti: volatilita voličov na Slovensku vo voľbách 2016

“…Viacerí autori sa venujú identifikovaniu faktorov volatility, ktoré do istej miery kopírujú aj faktory samotného voličského správania (Bartolini a Mair 1990;Birch 2003;Tavits 2005;Gherghina 2015). V zásade môžeme hovoriť o inštitucionálnych a individuálnych motivačných faktoroch.…”

Europeanization and political parties

“…This may imply a 'shallow Europeanization', and this characterization may be further reinforced by the actual behaviour of certain parties, such as the coalition between the SMER and extreme right populist parties in Slovakia in 2006. Second, and somewhat related to the first point, the lower degree of party system institutionalization (apart from Hungary and the Czech Republic), suggests that fluidity of position, indeed party system instability, cancels out the notion of 'misfit', that is, electoral volatility means that policy space is still open for new parties to exploit and 'established' parties to adapt more easily (see for example Tavits 2005;Lewis 2006b). …”