The Problem of Democratic Erosion in Belarus and Slovakia.

This paper examines differences between successful and unsuccessful political elites' strategic communications in the context of eroding democracies. In particular, this paper analyzes strategic mobilization appeals explicitly or implicitly expressed in the independent and pro-government print media in Slovakia during the election campaign of 1998 and in Belarus during the referendum campaign of 1996. It concludes that in Slovakia, where the opposition elites were successful in preventing the chief executive from usurping power, the opposition print media (1) communicated more messages of crisis and empowerment than the government press and (2) communicated a more balanced combination of the messages of crisis and empowerment than its Belarusian counterpart. My content analysis findings corroborate the hypotheses I set out to test in this paper about the importance of communicating messages of crisis and empowerment to overcome the problems of efficacy and free riding in mobilizing a pro-democratic movement. Indeed, in the three months before the parliamentary election in Slovakia in 1998, the opposition paper in Slovakia conveyed more messages of crisis and empowerment in a more balanced combination of both types of appeals, than did the Slovak government paper. In Belarus, the government papers conveyed more messages of empowerment than did the opposition papers, and in this way they may have influenced perceptions of not just presidential supporters but also of opposition sympathizers by imparting a belief that the president will succeed, hence, collective action is futile. Accordingly, the empirical data I have gathered, and the content analysis of this data that I have performed, support the two hypotheses regarding messages of crisis and empowerment that I set out to test in this chapter. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]