Literature provides four basic theories to explain regional election results and how they differ from national patterns: authority of regional governments, ethnic or linguistic cleavages, congruence ...of national and regional electoral systems, and second-order election effects. The second-order national election theory explains why regional elections exhibit lower turnout levels, why government parties lose voter support, and why opposition, minor, and new parties gain support. While second-order election theory provides the dominant explanation for countries with low regional power, we argue in favour of an additional explanation based on incumbency effects on parties' electoral support. We test the explanations on Czech regional and national election data for the years 2000-2020. The results attest to a strong effect of regional governorship, with a bonus of 5 percentage points for parties whose governors run for re-election. Parties also receive another bonus when national-level MPs and local mayors are present on the ballot.
In this article, we analyse how the degree of parliamentary activity affects both individual MPs' performance in the candidate selection process within the party and their popularity with voters at ...the electoral stage. We expect that parliamentary work of MPs matters less for voters' evaluations of MPs because of limited monitoring capacities and lower salience attached to this type of representation. The empirical analysis uses data from recent elections in the Czech Republic and Sweden. During the analysed period, these countries further personalised their flexible list electoral systems. Our results suggest that parties hold MPs accountable mainly through the threat of non-re-selection rather than by assigning them to a promising list position. While there is no evidence that voters consistently reward MPs' effort, the case of the Czech elections in 2010 shows that they may do so if context draws attention to individual MPs' work.
The institutional design of the Czech Republic's flexible-list PR system with optional preference voting allows us to examine not only who casts preference votes, but also how voters allocate ...preference votes to candidates on the party ballot. Drawing on the resources, proximity and identity models, we first examine how these voter attributes impact the decision to cast preference votes or not. We then extend our analysis to theorise and test the heterogeneous impacts of these factors on voting only for the list puller, for candidates other than the list puller, or for both types of candidates.
The literature on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected vote choice provides evidence of both ‘rally-’round-the-flag’ effects and the influence of perceived government pandemic performance. However, ...this evidence concerns short-term effects. Much less is known about how COVID-19-related economic changes and government measures in response to the pandemic have affected vote choice over a longer period. Using a post-election survey from the Czech Republic fielded in October 2021, we examine the effect of pandemic-related issues on support for governing parties in an election one and a half years after the pandemic started, focusing on a general evaluation of the economy and of government pandemic performance and on individual economic and health-related experiences of COVID-19. First, a negative health-related experience of COVID-19 did not affect vote choice. Second, only business loss negatively affected governmental support; job loss had no effect. Third, retrospective evaluations of the national economy and government pandemic performance affected vote choice, while retrospective evaluation of one’s personal economic situation did not. Fourth, the majority of the above-mentioned effects drove support for the dominant governing party (ANO) and only in a limited way support for the junior cabinet partner (ČSSD).
Elections to the Czech Chamber of Deputies were held on October 2526, 2013, seven months before the end of the full four-year parliamentary term. The June 2013 collapse of the center-right coalition ...and the ensuing stalemate between President Milo Zeman and parliament over the caretaker government led parliament to vote for its dissolution and early elections. The election results underscored the volatility in the Czech political party system, with dramatic changes in levels of party support and the emergence of new parties. A center-left coalition now governs, headed by Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka of the Social Democratic Party (SSD) along with the Christian Democrats (KDU-SL) and a new party, ANO 2011. Copyright Elsevier Ltd.
A common theme in studies of voter turnout in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is that the legacy of communism attenuates electoral participation. It is argued that socialization and the political ...habits that emerged under communism impeded democratic development by not motivating citizen activism. This paper examines this claim for voter turnout in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland for all general elections since 1990 using cohort analysis on pooled crosssectional post-election surveys from given countries. This paper shows that socialization and political habit formation under communism have had no discernible effect on voter turnout in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary between 1990 and 2013. Generational effects are evident in Poland suggesting that this country's political history is qualitatively different from that of its neighbours. This research is important in highlighting that citizens' political development within non-liberal democratic regimes does not always lead to lower levels of voter turnout. Consequently, the decline in turnout in CEE is likely to have attitudinal rather than generational origins where contemporary rather than historical political developments are most important.
•We analyse generational effects on turnout in post-communist countries since 1990.•We use cross-classified random effects model on pooled post-election surveys.•Socialization in different political regimes has weak effect on turnout.•Voters under communist regime didn't form a habit of voting under the compulsory voting.•Younger generations have almost the same propensity to vote as older generations.
This paper analyzes electoral volatility in the 2020 Slovak elections at the level of individual voters using exit poll surveys. The availability of exit polls from the previous elections of 2012 and ...2016 allows us to put the 2020 election in context and analyze the patterns (and deviances from them) observed across the three elections. Furthermore, the paper summarizes the aggregate volatility since 1992, demonstrating a high level of net volatility with peaks of over 30 percent. As for the individual level, the analysis concentrates on three important issues in volatility research: (1) vote losses of government parties and the incumbent effect; (2) the role of new parties in mobilization of previous non-voters and first-time voters; (3) since Slovakia is a country with a significant Hungarian minority, special attention is given to vote switching by Hungarian voters and more general patterns of ethnic voting.
The article examines four centre—right parties in East-Central Europe in order to assess the impact of ideology on party organization and revisit the thesis of organizational weakness in the region. ...The data collected indicate that, together with electoral success, inherited resources and national context, ideology does indeed shape the style of organization. Centre—right parties, as opposed to leftist parties, tend to be less bureaucratized, have fewer staff members, a simpler structure, more individualized leadership and the `party-in-public-office' tends also to have a more elevated role. Parties that have more individualistic ideologies tends also to have `lighter' organization and weaker embeddedness, while parties subscribing to a more collectivist and corporatist type of conservatism have developed more complex party organization and rely more heavily on affiliate organizations. Analysis of temporal changes uncovers a degree of organizational vitality that is surprising given that the literature on both centre—right and on post-communist politics points towards organizational weakness.
The goal of this article is to analyse changes in public attitudes towards the political regime, political institutions, political actors and politics in general. For that purpose, four categories of ...attitudes are differentiated: democratic legitimacy, institutional disaffection, individual disaffection, and political discontent. The study aims at clarifying both this dimensionality of political attitudes and the development of those attitudes in each dimension since the early 1990s. During the time period examined, political discontent underwent considerable growth and the legitimacy of the democratic régime declined. There have been slightly rising levels of institutional disaffection and stable levels of individual disaffection. There is a relatively strong and stable relationship between political discontent and legitimacy at both the aggregate and individual levels. This link suggests that the legitimacy of political regimes in post-communist countries is influenced by their political and economic performance.
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