Economic Voting in Post-Communist Eastern Europe Is to Analyze How Individual-Level Factors Affect Vote Choice from a Cross-National Perspective
CSD Center for the Study of Democracy An Organized Research Unit University of California, Irvine www.democ.uci.edu Between 1992 and 1994 a puzzling phenomenon manifested itself in four newly democratized states of Eastern Europe: political parties directly descendant of Soviet-era communist parties achieved parliamentary victories in Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria. In less than five years of democratic government, the citizens of these countries had become largely disillusioned with the myriad parties which had arisen in opposition to communism. 2 The relatively peaceful transitions in Eastern Europe permitted the formerly monolithic communist parties to continue playing significant roles in many of these new political regimes. Following internal restructuring, these ex-communist parties, with their established material, networking, and organizational resources, presented themselves as credible democratic alternatives to the major opposition parties associated with the transition to democracy and free-market capitalism. In Lithuania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, ex-communist parties acquired sufficient votes to obtain manufactured parliamentary majorities, 3 while in Poland, the ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) formed a coalition with two other parties to capture nearly three-quarters of the seats in the Polish Sejm. The behavior of voters in these four countries might be interpreted as a manifestation of nostalgia for the securities associated with the communist past: a time when street crime, unemployment, and unaffordable housing were practically non- existent. Yet, it would be misguided to suppose that electoral support for ex-communist parties equated to a desire for the return of the communist political regime. As Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan explain: .
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