Widely influential Duverger's "law" and "hypothesis" describe the main direction of influence of electoral rules on party systems; however, their formulations are quite blurry what makes their application to concrete electoral results often ambiguous. Therefore, this research conducted an original survey among electoral experts (n = 131) to explore whether they apply Duverger's rule in a consistent pattern which could lead to its less ambiguous specification. Experts' responses revealed a considerable heterogeneity which indicates that they are often unsure about the likely outcomes of electoral systems. Nevertheless, experts were, on average, close to the central tendency predicted by the Seat Product Models [Taagepera, Rein. 2007. Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems. New York: Oxford University Press] which quantifies the Duverger's rule. Hence, experts, on average, think that election outcomes should look like what Seat Product Models predict. Therefore, the Models should be used as a baseline in electoral studies, because they allow more fine-grained evaluation of electoral systems. ; Peer reviewed
Electoral 'winners' (i.e., voters casting a ballot for a party included in the post-electoral government) are acknowledged to be more satisfied with democracy than supporters of opposition parties. However, little is known about the influence of parties and their specifics on the boost in satisfaction with democracy experienced by their voters. To address this question, the research utilizes 17 surveys from 12 countries included in the European Social Survey rounds 1-8, for which a government replacement took place during the survey period. This allows this research to employ discontinuity design and examine the effect of two attributes related to parties-differences in party vote shares, and voters' feeling of closeness to a party. The findings suggest that these factors have a negligible influence on voters' satisfaction with democracy and only scant evidence is found that closeness to a party tends to increase their satisfaction. When voters' attitudes from before and after a government replacement are compared, changes in government do not seem to strike voters as a surprise and thus they do not cause any sudden and lasting changes in the general attitudes of electorates. Nevertheless, this indicates a novel contribution to the literature: the effect of losing needs some time to fully develop until it results in a decrease in satisfaction level. Based on these findings, the research concludes that when it comes to parties' characteristics, it is primarily the government/opposition status which determines voters' degree of satisfaction with democracy. ; Peer reviewed
Parties can not only actively adjust the electoral rules to reach more favourable outcomes, as is most often recognized in political science, but they also passively create an environment that systematically influences electoral competition. This link is theorized and included in the wider framework capturing the mutual dependence of electoral systems and party systems. The impact of passive influence is successfully tested on one out of two factors closely related to party systems: choice set size (i.e., number of options provided to voters) and degree of ideological polarization. The research utilizes established datasets (i.e., Constituency-Level Elections Archive, Party System Polarization Index, Chapel Hill Expert Survey, and Manifesto Project Database) and via regression analysis with clustered robust standard errors concludes that the choice set size constitutes an attribute with passive influence over electoral systems. Thus, it must be reflected when outcomes of electoral systems are estimated or compared across various contexts. ; Peer reviewed
This study connects two apparently disparate fields of inquiry in a specific quantitative way. In Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy, the majoritarian-consensual "executives-parties" score (L) combines five indices. Four of these largely or entirely derive from factors that Shugart and Taagepera, Votes from Seats, logically deduced from the product of two numbers: the number of seats in an average electoral district (M) and in the first or only chamber of representative assembly (S). Hence L connects to the purely institutional seat product MS (logged) along a simple logistic pattern. It can be predicted from L = 41+35 (MS)-0.56-2, with R-2 = 0.59. Thus, surprisingly, the majoritarian-consensual typology largely stems from the number of seats available. ; Peer reviewed
Popular consent is an essential element for success and stability of democracies. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that "electoral winners" (i.e. voters casting a ballot for government parties) are more satisfied with democracy than supporters of the opposition parties. However, little is known about the dynamics of satisfaction during the electoral cycle: Do winners become happier and losers even more discontent over time? We approach this question by utilizing an interview date in the European Social Survey (rounds 1–8) to position individuals within the different stages of electoral cycle. The results based on 199,207 responses from 199 surveys in 31 countries suggest that satisfaction with democracy stays relatively stable during the electoral cycle across various electoral systems if the political development is predictable. However, if actions of the parties are uncertain, namely the alternations of governments tend to be frequent, partial, and opened to all parties, and hence neither winners nor losers know how steady their status is with respect to the political development in the country, their satisfaction tend to fluctuate over time. Therefore, the conclusion reached is the more stable West European democracies have limited generalizability to the low-predictable systems in Central and Eastern Europe. ; Popular consent is an essential element for success and stability of democracies. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that "electoral winners" (i.e. voters casting a ballot for government parties) are more satisfied with democracy than supporters of the opposition parties. However, little is known about the dynamics of satisfaction during the electoral cycle: Do winners become happier and losers even more discontent over time? We approach this question by utilizing an interview date in the European Social Survey (rounds 1–8) to position individuals within the different stages of electoral cycle. The results based on 199,207 responses from 199 surveys in 31 countries suggest that satisfaction with democracy stays relatively stable during the electoral cycle across various electoral systems if the political development is predictable. However, if actions of the parties are uncertain, namely the alternations of governments tend to be frequent, partial, and opened to all parties, and hence neither winners nor losers know how steady their status is with respect to the political development in the country, their satisfaction tend to fluctuate over time. Therefore, the conclusion reached is the more stable West European democracies have limited generalizability to the low-predictable systems in Central and Eastern Europe. ; Peer reviewed
Abstract Postal voting intends to provide citizens residing abroad with a convenient voting technique to influence political representation in their country of origin. However, its adoption among individuals is dependent on two opposing factors. On the one hand, voting via post helps to overcome the increasing distance between a voter's residency abroad and the nearest polling station organized by a diplomatic mission (mostly at an embassy or a consulate). On the other hand, this way of voting also requires enough trust that the postal service and designated state office will successfully deliver one's vote to the ballot box because the result cannot be effectively verified without violation of the ballot secrecy. We examine the interaction of these two factors in an originally conducted survey among Finnish citizens residing abroad fielded shortly after the 2019 Parliamentary elections—the first occasion after Finland put postal voting into effect. Altogether, 664 respondents responded to all questions required for our specification of binomial logistic regression models controlling for various potential confounders. The results demonstrate that trust in postal voting moderates the impact of distance on one's probability to adopt postal voting. While low-trusting emigrant voters remain largely indifferent regardless of the distance to the nearest polling station, medium-trusting non-resident citizens increasingly mail their ballots when the nearest polling station is more than 100 km away. High-trusting individuals begin to increasingly do so when they are ten to 30 km away.
Given the fact that only two relevant parties in Slovakia since 1993 have managed to replace their leaders and maintain their relevance, the role of personality traits in the rise and success of party leaders in Slovakia is an especially important topic. Therefore this chapter focuses on two party leaders – Robert Fico and Mikuláš Dzurinda – who are closely tied to more than two decades of political development in Slovakia during 1998-2019. They both managed to utilize their high level of personal popularity to reach the party leadership and via electoral success achieve intra-party cohesion and increase the membership in their parties. However, while Fico relied on his public popularity for another decade after becoming Prime Minister for the first time, Dzurinda gave up on building the popular public image and focused on managing his heterogeneous coalitions. Fico's SMER thus remained an internally homogeneous party (to an outside observer) for as long as Fico was the most popular politician in Slovakia, while Dzurinda's SDKÚ was completely marginalized because Dzurinda was not willing to step down as chairman, despite his decreasing public support and increasing criticism from inside the party. ; Peer reviewed
This paper maps and compares the main topics articulated by political parties in their manifestos published for the Slovak parliamentary elections in 2010 and 2012. First, the paper discusses the conceptual grounds of policy space dynamics. Next, it outlines the method used for the research, based upon quantitative content analysis of the parties' manifestos of the Comparative Manifestos Project Group. Relevance of individual issues is measured by their representation in manifestos. The paper also examines the change in parties' priorities for the 2012 election compared to the election of 2010. With the help of an additional methodology tool, the parties under review are then put along a left-right spectrum. Using this technique, the policy space during the period of both elections is examined. Simultaneously, party shifts along the left-right spectrum that emerged from the obtained data are presented. The final section of the article exposes the descriptive results to the theoretical assumptions about policy space dynamics presented in the beginning. Adapted from the source document.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the traditional "booth, ballot, and pen" model of voting, based on a specific location and physical presence, may not be feasible during a health crisis. This situation has highlighted the need to assess whether existing national electoral legislation includes enough instruments to ensure citizens' safety during voting procedures, even under the conditions of a global pandemic. Such instruments, often grouped under the umbrella of voter facilitation or convenience voting, range from voting in advance and various forms of absentee voting (postal, online, and proxy voting) to assisted voting and voting at home and in hospitals and other healthcare institutions. While most democracies have implemented at least some form of voter facilitation, substantial cross-country differences still exist. In the push to develop pandemic-sustainable elections in different institutional and political contexts, variation in voter facilitation makes it possible to learn from country-specific experiences. As accessibility and inclusiveness are critical components of elections for ensuring political legitimacy and accountability these lessons are of utmost importance. In this study, we focus on Finland, where the Parliament decided in March 2021 to postpone for two months the municipal elections that were originally scheduled to be held on April 18. Although the decision was mostly justified by the sudden and dramatic daily increase in new COVID-19 infections, the inability to guarantee the opportunity to vote for those in quarantine was included among the likely risks. The failure to organize health-safe voting procedures to accommodate the original schedule emphasizes a certain paradox in the Finnish electoral legislation: caution in introducing new facilitation instruments has led to lower levels of preparedness and flexibility in crisis situations. Although a forerunner in implementing extensive advance voting opportunities, Finland has only recently introduced postal voting, which is restricted to voters living abroad. Hence, we ask: what can be learned from this form of convenience voting if expanded to all voters to enhance the sustainability of elections? Our analyses are based on a survey conducted among non-resident voters ( n = 2,100) after the 2019 parliamentary elections in which postal voting from abroad was allowed for the first time. Our results show that whereas trust in the integrity of postal voting is quite high, various efforts needed from individual voters substantially increase the costs of postal voting. Postal operations also raise concerns. Furthermore, voters felt that requiring two witnesses made postal voting cumbersome, an issue that needs to be resolved, particularly if applying postal voting in the context of a pandemic. The Finnish case constitutes a concrete example of a situation in which voter facilitation targeted to a particular segment of society may become a testbed for electoral engineering that will improve voting opportunities for everyone.
In divided societies and new democracies, clientelism (in the form of pork barrel) and ethno-politics appear to go hand in hand. It is apparent that politicians are incentivized to compete for support within their own ethnic groups, but does an ethnic link between voters and decision-makers influence how voters perceive and evaluate pork barrel practices? To address this question, we conducted a survey experiment (n=1,200) in ethnically heterogeneous Slovakia. The aim was to examine whether pork barrel politics implemented by a Slovak decision-maker and a Hungarian decision-maker are evaluated differently by Slovaks and Hungarians. The findings suggest that when individuals and decision-makers share the same ethnicity, individuals tend to maintain an equally positive level of trust and willingness to vote for the responsible decision-maker, even when the decision-maker implements a policy decision that does not benefit them. Nonetheless, shared ethnicity does not prevent individuals from being critical of the implemented policy decision itself. ; Peer reviewed
There is perennial debate in comparative politics about electoral institutions, but what characterizes this debate is the lack of consideration for citizens' perspective. In this paper, we report the results of an original survey conducted on representative samples in 15 West European countries ( N = 15,414). We implemented an original instrument to elicit respondents' views by asking them to rate "real but blind" electoral outcomes. With this survey instrument, we aimed to elicit principled rather than partisan preferences regarding the kind of electoral outcomes that citizens think is good for democracy. We find that West Europeans do not clearly endorse a majoritarian or proportional vision of democracy. They tend to focus on aspects of the government rather than parliament when they pass a judgment. They want a majority government that has few parties and enjoys wide popular support. Finally, we find only small differences between citizens of different countries.
