Transitional Economic Voting:Economic Conditions and Election Results in Russia, Poland, Hungary,Slovakia, and the CzechRepublic from 1990-1999.

The field of economic voting in post-communist countries is small but growing. To date, though, most analyses have examined but a single election or a single country (although there are a few important exceptions). As a result, most studies generally focus on the question, “How has the economy affected the vote for the parties that contested this particular election?” This is not to say that the authors do not have a priori expectations, but they are by and large couched in the particular circumstances of that country and tend to remain more implicit than explicit. The same holds for the role of the economy in other general studies of voting in post-communist countries. My paper moves beyond country-specific approaches to understanding the effect of economic conditions on election results by searching for broader, more general models that can be applied in any post-communist country. Moreover, I take the additional step of directly linking the models I propose to the existing literature on the effects of economic conditions on election results in established democracies, while at the same time modifying them to take account of the realities of the post-communist context. In this manner, I hope to make theoretical contributions both to our understanding of the interaction between economic factors and electoral outcomes in post-communist countries and the general economic voting literature. In the paper, I introduce and compare two such general models. The Referendum Model, which builds off the main strand of the economic voting literature, predicts that Incumbent parties will benefit from stronger economic conditions, while the Transition Model, derived from a secondary strand of the economic voting literature focusing on party type, predicts that New Regime parties will benefit from stronger economic conditions and Old Regime parties will benefit from weaker economic conditions. Using an original data set of regional-level economic, demographic, and electoral variables and a novel method of comparative analysis, I test these models across the 20 national presidential and parliamentary elections that took place between 1990-99 in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Across numerous empirical tests, consistently stronger evidence is found to support the Transition Model than the Referendum Model. These findings should be of interest to students of elections and voting in post-communist countries, those concerned with economic voting more generally, and scholars interested in the methodological challenges of conducting comparative analysis in new democracies. Moreover, they have interesting implications for current debates regarding the relationship between elections and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]