Joshua A. Tucker

 

Books, Journal Articles, Papers Under Review, and Working Papers

Books

Tucker, Joshua A., 2006, Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Russia, 1990-99, New York: Cambridge University Press.  

Available for purchase in paperback, hardcover, and e-book format.  Click here for more information. 

Reviewed in: Perspectives on Politics; Comparative Political Studies; The Journal of Politics; Foreign Affairs; Slavic Review; The Russia Review; Canadian Journal of Politics

Abstract: This study demonstrates that in a time of massive change characterized by the emergence of entirely new political systems and a fundamental reorganization of economic life, systematic patterns of economic conditions affecting election results at the aggregate level can in fact be identified during the first decade of postcommunist elections in five postcommunist countries: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Intriguingly, incumbency status is not the best predictor of these effects. Instead, parties that are primarily identified with the “Old Regime” that predated the transition enjoy more electoral success in regions with more economic losers, while “New Regime” parties that are mostly closely identified with the movement away from communism consistently enjoy more electoral support in regions with more economic winners. A variety of theoretical arguments concerning the conditions in which these effects are more or less likely to be present are also proposed and tested. Analysis is conducted using an original data set of regional level economic, demographic, and electoral indicators, and features both broadly based comparative assessments of the findings across all twenty elections as well as more focused case study analyses of pairs of individual elections.

Journal Articles

“Disenchanted or Discerning? Voter Turnout in Post-Communist Countries” with Alexander Pacek and Grigore Pop-Eleches, forthcoming at The Journal of Politics

Abstract: Voter turnout in post-communist countries has exhibited substantial variability against a backdrop of economic and political volatility. In this paper, we consider three explanations for this variation: a “depressing disenchantment” hypothesis that predicts voters are less likely to vote in elections when political and economic conditions are worse; a “motivating disenchantment” hypothesis that predicts voters are more likely to vote in elections when conditions are worse; and a “stakes” based hypothesis that predicts voters are more likely to vote in more important elections. Using an aggregate-level cross-national time-series data set of 137 presidential and parliamentary elections in nineteen post-communist countries, we find much stronger empirical support for the stakes-based approach to explaining variation in voter turnout than we do for either of the disenchantment-based approaches. Our findings offer a theoretically integrated picture of voter participation in the post-communist world, and, more broadly, contribute new insights into political participation in new democracies.

 

Euroskepticism and the Emergence of Political Parties in Poland (with Radoslaw Markowski), forthcoming at Party Politics

 

Abstract: One of the most interesting features of the 2003 Polish referendum on EU membership was the strong link between voting behavior in the 2003 referendum and voting behavior in the 2001 Polish parliamentary election.  In this manuscript, we test two competing mechanisms that could account for this finding: a responsible party model, whereby citizens’ attitudes toward EU membership would have been driven by their preferred party’s position on the issue; and a more Downsian model, whereby the existence of an unrepresented Polish Euroskeptic electorate could have driven the success of two new Euroskeptic parties in the 2001 parliamentary elections.  Drawing upon data from the 1997, 2001, and 2005 Polish National Election Studies, we find much stronger empirical support for the Downsian approach.  Far from being led to their Euroskepticism by party leaders as the 2003 referendum on Polish EU membership approaches, voters for Poland’s Euroskeptic parties in 2001 already possessed healthy degrees of Euroskepticism, especially when compared to supporters of other parties and even to non-voters.

 

“Pathways to Partisanship: Evidence from Russia” with Ted Brader, forthcoming at Post-Soviet Affairs

Abstract: Scholars focus extraordinary attention on party identification in established democracies, yet we know little about its origins.  Newly competitive party systems provide an opportunity to observe individuals as they first acquire partisan orientations.  We investigate the development of partisanship shortly after the advent of multiparty competition in Russia.  We group expectations from existing scholarship into several potential “pathways” to partisanship.  The evidence indicates these pathways are not equal.  Political motivation and ability, voting experience, exposure to politics, and civic motivations contribute substantially more than group pressures and immersion in social networks to partisan stability, consistency, and self-identification.  The results also help clarify a discrepancy between theories that see partisanship as a crutch for the unaware and evidence that partisans are more sophisticated than their fellow citizens.  We find elements of sophistication pushing in opposite directions – engagement and expertise spur the acquisition of partisanship while the capacity to process information, acquired with education, dampens it.

 

“Enough! Electoral Fraud, Collective Action Problems, and the "2nd Wave" of Post-Communist Democratic Revolutions”, Perspectives on Politics, 53(5): 537-553.

 

Abstract: In countries where citizens have strong grievances against the regime, attempts to address these grievances in the course of daily life are likely to entail high costs coupled with very low chances of success in any meaningful sense; consequently, most citizens will choose not to challenge the regime, thus reflecting the now well known collective action problem.  When a regime commits electoral fraud, however, an individual’s calculus regarding whether to participate in a protest against the regime can be changed significantly.  This argument yields important implications for how we interpret the wave of “colored revolutions” that swept through Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan in the first half of this decade.  Applying the collective action framework to the colored revolutions also yields a parsimonious contribution to the political science literature on social protest: electoral fraud can be a remarkably useful tool for solving the collective action problems faced by citizens in countries where governments are not, to use Barry Weingast’s language, appropriately restrained by the populace (Weingast 1997, 2005).  While modest, such an observation actually can speak to a wide-ranging number of questions in the literature, including why people choose to protest when they do (Kuran 1991; Tarrow 1994), how protests at one place and time can affect the likelihood for future protests (Chong 1991; Tarrow 1994), and new aspects of the relationship between elections and protest (Javeline 2003b). 

 

"Strategic Voting and Information Transmission in Sequential Elections: Run Boris Run" with Adam Meirowitz, 2007, The Journal of Politics, 69(1): 88-99.

Abstract: Following the 1995 Russian parliamentary election, it was suggested that Russian voters may have used their votes to send a message to the current Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, who was scheduled to run for re-election six months later. Building on this observation, we consider the incentives for information transmission through strategic voting in systems with sequential elections. We find that when an election for a sufficiently weak institution (usually a parliament) precedes an election for a strong institution (usually a president), in any equilibrium some voters vote against their preferred party in the first election to send a message to candidates in the second election. Following a brief discussion of the intuition underlying this argument, we present a model that allows us to isolate institutional features that affect the prevalence of this type of strategic voting: the relative importance of institutions to voters, the timing of sequential elections and the relative cost of responsiveness by candidates. The paper concludes with suggestions for future empirical tests of the model's implications.

“‘Don’t Knows’ and Public Opinion Towards Economic Reform: Evidence from Russia” with Adam Berinsky, 2006, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 39(1): 73-99.

Abstract: As market reform has spread throughout the globe, both scholars and policy makers have become increasingly interested in attempting to measure public opinion towards economic changes. However, recent research from American politics suggests that special care must be paid to how surveys treat non-respondents to these types of questions. We extend this line of inquiry to a well known case of large scale economic reform, Russia in the mid-1990s. Our major finding is that Russians who fail to answer survey questions tend to be consistently less “liberal” than their counterparts who are able to answer such questions. This finding has implications both for our understanding of Russian public opinion in the 1990s, as well as for measuring attitudes towards economic reform more generally.

"Pocketbooks, Politics, and Parties: The 2003 Polish Referendum on EU Membership" with Radoslaw Markowski, 2005, Electoral Studies, 24(3): 409-433

Abstract: We analyze the results Poland’s historic June, 2003 referendum on whether or not to join the European Union (EU).  We find that demographic factors did not play a particularly large role in determining vote choice in the referendum.  As alternatives, we propose economic, political, and party based hypotheses, and find empirical support for all three.  We also examine the decision to participate in the referendum in an effort to assess the affect of the strategic dilemma posed by a referendum with a minimum turnout threshold for opponents of the referendum.  Analysis is conducted on both the aggregate and individual level, utilizing an original county-level dataset and a national public opinion survey.

"Feeding the Hand that Bit You: Voting for Ex-Authoritarian Rulers in Russia and Bolivia" with Amber Seligson, 2005, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, 13(1): 11-42.

Abstract: What could be motivating voters in some emerging democracies to vote for leaders who have proven themselves to be skilled at violating human rights, repressing civil liberties, and ruling without democratic institutions?  We test hypotheses related to this question by using a least-similar-systems design in which we search for common predictors of vote choice in presidential elections from two countries that differ in their past and current political and economic situations: Bolivia and Russia.  We find consistent patterns in these two very different countries that lead to the conclusion that voters for ex-authoritarian candidates or parties are not merely motivated by the factors that typically shape vote choice in long-standing democracies, but that they additionally exhibit a clear preference for non-democratic political systems.

"Learning from Terrorist Markets" with Adam Meirowitz, Perspectives on Politics, Vol.2, No.2 (2004) 331-6.

"Transitional Winners and Losers: Attitudes Toward EU Membership in Post-Communist Countries," with Alexander Pacek and Adam Berinsky, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 46, No.3 (2002, 557-571) 

Abstract: We present a model of citizen support for EU membership designed explicitly for post-communist countries. We posit that membership in the EU can function as an implicit guarantee that the economic reforms undertaken since the end of communism will not be reversed. On this basis, we predict that “winners” who have benefited from the transition, are more likely to support EU membership for their country than “losers” who have been hurt by the transition. We also predict that supporters of the free market will be more likely to support EU membership than those who oppose the free market. We test these propositions using survey data from ten post-communist countries that have applied for membership in the EU and find strong support for our hypotheses. The article concludes by speculating about the role attitudes towards EU membership may play in the development of partisan preferences.

Click here for supplemental tables mentioned on p.565.

"The First Decade of Post-Communist Elections and Voting: What Have We Studied, and How Have We Studied It?" Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 5 (2002) 271-304.

Abstract: This review assesses the state of the newly emerging field of the study of post-communist elections and voting by developing a database of 101 articles on the topic that have appeared in 16 leading academic journals (8 general political science journals and 8 post-communist area studies journals) between 1990 and 2000.  The database is then used to make inferences concerning both what is being studied by scholars and how it is being studied.  It systematically assesses which countries have been analyzed, the types of elections examined, the prevalence of comparative analysis, the division between quantitative and qualitative research, and the types of data used in quantitative studies.  It then turns to substantive questions, examining both how scholars have explained post-communist election results and voting decisions, and what they have used these elections to explain.

 “An Easy and Accurate Regression Model for Multiparty Electoral Data” with Michael Tomz and Jason Wittenberg, Political Analysis, Vol. 10, No.1 (2002) 66-83.

 Abstract: Katz and King (1999) propose a new statistical model for multiparty election data.   They argue that ordinary least squares (OLS) regression is inappropriate when the dependent variable measures the share of the vote going to each party, and they recommend a superior technique.  Regrettably, the Katz-King model requires a high level of statistical expertise and is computationally impractical for more than three political parties.  We offer a sophisticated yet convenient alternative that utilizes seemingly unrelated regression (SUR).  The SUR procedure is nearly as easy to use as OLS, yet performs as well as Katz-King model in predicting the distribution of votes and the composition of parliament.  Moreover, the SUR scales easily to an arbitrarily large number of parties.  The model has been incorporated into Clarify, a statistical suite that is available for free on the Internet.

"Economic Conditions and the Vote for Incumbent Parties in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic from 1990-1996," Post Soviet Affairs, Vol.17, No.4 (2001) 309-331.

Abstract: I employ regional electoral, economic and demographic data across several transition countries -- Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, and Russia -- to examine the effects of economic conditions on the electoral fortunes of incumbents.  "Primary Incumbents" and "Other Incumbents" are distinguished in order to anlayze how the "Degree of Incumbency" affects the relationship between economic conditions and election results for these two different types of incumbents in post-communist countries.  The article points to new questions and methods for examining multiparty elections as well as for the relationship between economic conditions and voting outcomes.

Click here to download the omitted Appendix on Coding of Incumbent Parties that is discussed on p.315-6 of the text.

"The Emergence of Mass Partisanship in Russia, 1993-96" with Ted Brader, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 45, No.1 (2001) 69-83.

Abstract: Previous studies of Russia search for party identification in an all-or-nothing fashion.  We adopt an alternative approach to studying the emergence of mass partisanship in new democracies.  In accordance with established theories, we argue that partisanship develops over time and that evidence of partisanship in its early stages may be found in basic behavioral and attitudinal indicators.  We stipulate three expectations for the emergence of partisanship: (1) attachment grows with the cumulative effect of political experience; (2) as attachment grows, other views acquire greater partisan consistency; and (3) attachments have a rational basis.  Guided by these expectations, we use panel survey data from Russia's early elections to distinguish nascent partisans.  Comparison of the behavior of partisans identified by our approach to the behavior of partisans using self-reported identification measures raises doubts about how well self-identification measures capture partisanship in this context.

"Walking the Tightrope: An Exploration of the Political Culture Concept and its Applications for Foreign Policy Analysis," Paradigms: The Kent Journal of International Relations, Vol.9, No.1 (1995) 37-61.

Abstract: I develop the outlines of a model of political culture which can be used to as a tool of foreign policy analysis.  I first examine the various attempts that have been made to define political culture generally, and explores some of the ways in which the concept has been applied.  I then move the concept of political culture for the domestic sphere into the realm of foreign policy analysis by developing a "political culture of foreign policy" that aims to combine both objective classifications and subjective approaches.

NOTE: Articles should be downloaded for personal use only.

Papers Under Review

Looking to the Future: A Better Way to Study Prospective Economic Voting (with Kristin Michelitch, Marco Morales, and Andrew Owen), revise and resubmit at Electoral Studies

 

Abstract: Why have mixed results been found in assessing the impact of prospective economic expectations on vote choice? This paper offers an answer and a solution. We argue that the standard prospective economic expectation survey question - ``how will the economy perform over the next 12 months?" - contains an unacceptably large degree of measurement error. Indeed, in most election studies, we can not know how respondents are answering this question. Thus we posit seven "response regimes" respondents could be using to answer this question and illustrate how significantly findings vary depending on the response regime employed. Our solution turns to Downs' (1957) original formulation of prospective voting, which calls for future economic evaluations conditional on which party wins the election.

 

What’s Left Behind When the Party’s Over: Survey Experiments on the Effects of Partisan Cues in Putin’s Russia (with Ted Brader)

Abstract: We consider the question of whether Russia’s greatly weakened political parties might continue to exert an influence on public opinion in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.  To do so, we carried out a series of survey-based experiments in Moscow in the Spring of 2006.  We present evidence showing that partisan cues increase support for public policy proposals and make it more likely that respondents will adopt a position on an issue that mirrors their party’s preferred position (“opinion taking”), as well as increase the likelihood that respondents will adopt a position on a given issue at all (“opinion giving”).  Furthermore, we also present some very tentative findings that are suggestive of signs of an emerging pattern of issue ownership, suggesting another means by which partisan cues can affect Russian public opinion.  The findings should be of interest to those concerned with Russia’s post-communist political development, those interested more broadly in the effects of partisan cues on political behavior, as well as to scholars trying to characterize the nature of “competitive authoritarian” regimes.

Key Words: Russia, survey experiments, partisan cues, public opinion formation, post-communist politics

 

Past is Still Present: Micro-level Comparisons of Conventional vs. Transitional Economic Voting in Three Polish Elections (with Andrew Owen)

Abstract: Using survey data from three Polish parliamentary elections, we provide the first systematic micro-level test contrasting a standard incumbency-based model of economic voting with a transitional economic voting model in the post-communist context. To do so, we introduce an novel temporal component to micro-level studies of economic voting that supplements standard short term retrospective economic evaluations (e.g., “do you feel the economy has improved in the past 12 months?”) with longer “transitional” retrospective economic evaluations (e.g., “do you feel the economy has improved since the collapse of communism?”). Our analyses reveals a nuanced picture suggesting multiple paths for economic influences on voting in post-communist countries. We find evidence consistent with the standard incumbency-based approach, but only for the specific set of evaluations to which the theory is most appropriately applied: short-term retrospective economic evaluations and the vote for incumbent parties. By contrast, the transitional model is strongly supported by evidence that evaluations of changes in economic conditions since the collapse of communism (“long term economic evaluations”) have an effect on the vote for a range of parties. We demonstrate that these results are robust to model specification and generational effects.

 

Additional Working Papers

Do Party Cues Affect Policy Opinions in New Party Systems? Survey Experiments in Three Post-Communist Countries (with Ted Brader)

Abstract: We conduct experiments to test the impact in partisanship on policy opinions in three post-communist countries: Russia, Hungary, and Poland.  In doing so, we seek to make several contributions.  First, by carrying out this research in more than one place, we hope to move the debate past the applicability of claims about partisanship to this or that particular country.  Second, this is also an initial step toward explaining how and why the meaning or effectiveness of partisanship varies, if it indeed does, across societies.  The post-communist countries, as recent newcomers to competitive party politics, offer a useful contrast to U.S., which possesses the most venerable and stable party system on the planet (Brader et al. 2008).  Russia, Hungary, and Poland also permit comparisons across systems that share similarities in the timing of their most recent transition toward democracy and the nature of the prior regime, but which also differ in the stability of their own party systems and indeed the relevance of parties to political outcomes.  Third, these cases provide an opportunity to contribute more generally to our knowledge about the impact of party cues on opinion formation by extending experimental work to multiparty systems. 

Money, Effort, and Votes: The Non-Emergence of a Political Party (with Konstantin Sonin)

Abstract: The presence of functioning parties greatly enhances the effectiveness of a political system. In this paper, we analyze how sources of party finance may affect the structure of individual parties and the political system as a whole. If party's money come from a single source, then the party leadership is very strong relative to rank-and-file members and local leaders. Hence, there will be more loyalty and less diversity inside the party, the situation usually preferred by the current leadership, but detrimental to the party's long-term prospects. The existence of grassroots organizations mitigates these effects, making party leaders less willing to sacrifice the interests of large constituencies in return for campaign contributions from special interests. As a result of this, in an economy high wealth and income inequality and significant discretionary authority of the state over business affairs, one might expect a larger number of small, leader- dependent parties to form. We use this model to explain non-emergence of mass political parties in Russia.

 

Which Way is the Rich Way?  The Micro-Macro Paradox of EU Accession (with Alexander Herzog)

Abstract: In this paper, we document a hitherto unrecognized “micro-macro paradox” of EU accession in post-communist countries: on the micro-level, economic prosperity increases the likelihood of supporting EU membership; while on the macro-level, economic prosperity decreases aggregate levels of support for EU membership. To do so, we first present evidence demonstrating that economic winners were consistently more likely to support EU membership than economic losers across five years (1995, 1996, 2001, 2002, 2003) and ten countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, and the Czech Republic). We then demonstrate that across this same set of countries we are unable to find a systematic corresponding link between aggregate level measures of economic prosperity and aggregate levels of support for EU membership.  Moreover, in almost every analysis where we can find a consistent pattern, it is in the opposite direction: less economic success translates into higher levels of aggregate support for EU membership. Our explanation for the micro-macro paradox of EU accession builds off of previous work by one of the authors (Tucker et al. 2002) suggesting that for citizens in post-communist countries the EU represents a guarantee that the economic reforms will continue. However, we argue here that there may be other meanings for EU membership as well and that the relative salience of these different meanings may in particular be conditional on the passage of time and on a country’s likelihood of joining the EU. We then demonstrate how this more nuanced approach to the meaning of EU membership in the post communist context both explains the original paradox and test the extent to which additional observable implications of the argument are supported by the data.

Key Words: European Union, EU, Post-communist countries, Public-Opinion Formation, Micro-Macro Paradox, Red State – Blue State Paradox, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria

New Approaches to Electoral Volatility: Evidence from Postcommunist Countries (with Eleanor Powell)

Abstract: The development of a stable party system is considered an essential element of a consolidated democracy.  Party system stability has been most frequently measured in terms of electoral volatility, which attempts to capture the stability of the electorate’s preferences across elections.  The traditional measure of party stability, Pedersen’s Index of Volatility, however, includes both volatility among stable parties and volatility created by party entry and exit without distinguishing between the two.  When both types of volatility are likely to be present, e.g. especially in newer democracies, this is potentially troubling because we expect different factors to be causing the two different types of volatility.  More fundamentally, we argue that volatility caused by entry and exit is primarily a function of elite decision making – in terms of whether or not a new party is formed – while volatility across existing parties is primarily a function of voter decision making.  To address these concerns, we separate these different components of volatility into their constituent parts, creating a Type A Volatility measure that captures volatility from party entry and exit and a Type B Volatility measure that captures volatility among stable parties that contest both elections.  We then separately test hypotheses specific to both Type A and Type B volatility using data from 80 elections across 21 postcommunist countries.  We report three primary findings.  First, the majority of electoral volatility in postcommunist countries is of the Type A variety, stemming from the entry and exit of political parties into the electoral arena, and has been declining over time.  Second, variation in Type A volatility is a function of both institutional factors (largely through electoral thresholds and a growing understanding of the meaning of these thresholds) and sociodemographic conditions, but does not appear to react to short-term economic shocks.  Third, Type B volatility has actually increased slightly over time, but does not seem to be systematically predicted by any of our theoretically relevant variables.  Theses results should be of interest to students of voting behavior generally, those that study electoral volatility in particular, analysts of political behavior in postcommunist countries, and scholars interested in the growing application of multi-level models in the study of comparative politics.

Key Words: Voting, Elections, Electoral Volatility, Pedersen’s Index, post-communist countries, political behavior, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia

Reflective and Unreflective Partisans? Experimental Evidence on the Links between Information, Opinion, and Party Identification (with Ted Brader) NEW VERSION *MAY 2008*

We carry out a series of original experiments in three post-communist countries: Russia, Hungary, and Poland.  The experiments test the extent to which information about political parties influences the development of partisanship in newly competitive party systems. We find that exposure to information about the positions of political parties tends to strengthen partisanship when party systems are at least somewhat stable.  In Russia, where parties are relatively stable but not particularly relevant, this effect is generally constant across levels of political sophistication.  In Hungary, however, where parties are both stable and extremely relevant to the political process, this effect has a curvilinear relationship to political sophistication, with strong effects present only for mid-level sophisticates.  Conversely, reflecting on the proximity of parties to one’s own position on issues (by completing issue position scales) weakens partisanship among the least politically sophisticated; this effect is present in Russia, Poland, and Hungary, so does not appear to be sensitive to variation in political context within the post-communist world.  Taken together, they suggest that there may be two different paths to partisanship in newly competitive political systems, one which is more reflective and based on the policy position of political parties (e.g., a Downsian or rationalist approach) and one which may be less reflective and is more likely prevalent among less politically sophisticated citizens.  We also introduce a new theoretical framework for synthesizing existing approaches to the study of partisanship that allows us both to transport the concept more seamlessly across different political contexts and to generate additional hypotheses concerning the determinants of partisanship.

 

Subjective vs. Objective Proximity in Poland: New Directions for the Empirical Study of Political Representation  (with Radoslaw Markowski)

While theoretical questions concerning the nature of political representation have long fascinated political scientists of all stripes, the empirical study of political representation has almost exclusively featured studies of stable, established democracies (Miller and Stokes 1963; Barnes 1977; Dalton 1985; Converse and Pierce 1986; Powell 1989).  Moreover, left largely unexplored – despite its role as an underlying motivating feature of the whole enterprise – has been the manner in which representation affects the political attitudes and behavior of members of the electorate. We take up precisely this question as we concurrently shift the focus of our study to one of Europe’s most important new democracies: Poland, the largest of the so called new “EU 12”.  We introduce a new dataset, the 2005 Polish National Election Study (Polish NES), which was specifically designed to study the topic of political representation.  We use the Polish NES to test a wide range of important but relatively unexplored questions concerning the effects of sharing policy positions with political parties.  More specifically, we examine whether being closer on issues to a given party increases the likelihood of voting for (or expressing a preference for in the case of non-voters) that party, and whether that effect is stronger for subjective or objective proximity. We also test whether being closer to one’s preferred party is related to feelings of partisanship, consistency in voting patterns, participation in elections, feeling efficacious in regard to the government, and satisfaction with democracy, and we can examine whether this relationship is more important for different versions of objective proximity.  We present a variety of findings in the text, but two of the most important are that: (1) smaller perceived distance from a given party (“subjective proximity”) is always correlated with a preference/vote for that party, even when this is not the case using objective measures of the party’s position; and (2) closer proximity to one’s party in both subjective and objective terms is related to more overall satisfaction with the political system, but not necessarily stronger feelings of partisanship or a greater likelihood of participating in the political system though voting.

People Power or a One-Shot Deal? The Legacy of the Colored Revolutions Considered from a Collective Action Framework

In the first half of the first decade of the 21st century, a number of countries that had by and large failed to establish viable democratic governments in the original period of post-communist transitions ten years earlier suddenly rose up to demand democratic accountability following a series of fraudulent elections.  Scholars of course took notice, with a flurry of articles appeared with the goal of trying to explain how and why the “Colored Revolutions” took place.  Left relatively unexplored, however, was the legacy of the Colored Revolutions for the future of political protest for the countries in which they had occurred.  In this paper, I take up precisely this question.  More specifically, I lay out two possible legacies of the Colored Revolutions.  The most intuitive expectation would be one that highlights citizens’ discovery of their own “people power”, leading us to expect to see protests again in the future when democratic development is threatened by corrupt or inept leaders.  Surprisingly, though, when we consider in sufficient detail the micro-level motivation of protestors that took to the streets in the original Colored Revolutions, a paradox emerges: to the extent that the need for a second “Colored Revolution” might emerge in a country, it will simultaneously call into question whether the gains from the original Colored Revolution was worth the cost paid by the people who participated in it.  In order to do this, I draw upon a framework that I have presented in detail elsewhere that suggests one way to think about the Colored Revolutions is in terms of the collective action problem faced by citizens who are confronted by an abusive or unrestrained regime (Tucker 2007).  

 

Red, Brown, and Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic from 1990-99

Abstract: The vast majority of all work on economic voting has focused on the question of who benefits when economic conditions are better.  For multiparty democracies, though, the question of who is likely to benefit when economic conditions are worse is equally, if not more, important.  Using an original data set of regional level economic, demographic, and electoral variables, I explore this question using cross-regional variation in election results in 19 national presidential and parliamentary elections from Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic that took place between 1990-99.  While there is very strong empirical support for the hypothesis that communist successor parties performed better in areas of the country where economic conditions were worse, there is surprisingly little support for the hypothesis that nationalist parties perform better under similar circumstances.

It’s Nothing Personal?  The Appeal of Party Leaders and the Development of Partisanship in Russia (with Ted Brader, Download in .pdf format)

Abstract: One of the most common assumptions about Russia’s nascent party system is that it is overly “personalistic,” yet their have been surprisingly few attempts to provide empirical support for this claim at the mass level.  In order to address the question directly, we test three hypotheses concerning the relationships between citizens’ evaluations of leaders and their development of partisan attachment.  First, evaluations of leaders could have no relationship to the development  of partisan attachments (the null hypothesis).  Second, evaluations of leaders could be one factor of many that affect the development of partisanship (the reasoned voter hypothesis).  Finally, evaluations of leaders could be the determining factor in affecting the development of partisanship, overwhelming all other considerations (the personalism hypothesis).  Relying on data from a three wave panel survey of citizens during the 1995-1996 Russian electoral cycle, we find compelling evidence that the personal appeal of political leaders contributes to developing partisanship in Russia.  The results hold across multiple measures of the explanatory variable that operationalize leader appeal as either extreme opinionation about leaders generally or an intense attraction to individual leaders.  On the basis of these findings, we confidently reject the null hypothesis that attitudes toward political leaders are irrelevant to the development of partisanship.  We also confidently reject the personalism hypothesis:  Russians’ feelings about their leaders are influential in the formation of partisanship along side numerous other factors, such as political awareness and involvement, social position, former membership in the CPSU, and trust in government.

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

Abstract:  This is a working paper I prepared while writing my book Regional Economic Voting that highlighted one of the principal findings of the book.  It is a useful way to get a quick sense of one of the arguments in the book, but it does not contain the final versions of the results that are presented in the book, nor does it go into nearly the level of detail on either the theory or the methodology as the book does.  For this reason, this paper is no longer available for citation -- anyone wishing to cite findings in the paper should refer to the book instead for the final versions of these analyses and cite the book.  I am leaving the paper on my website, however, for those who would like a quick overview of the argument and findings.

In the paper, I present two models for predicting the effect of cross-regional variation of economic conditions on cross-regional variation in election results in post-communist countries.  The Referendum Model predicts that Incumbent parties will perform better in areas of the country with better economic conditions, while the Transition Model predicts that New Regime parties will perform better in areas of the country where the economy is stronger and Old Regime parties will perform better where the economy is weaker.  Using an original data set of regional level economic, demographic, and electoral variables, I demonstrate that across 20 national presidential and parliamentary elections from Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, there is substantially stronger empirical support for the Transition Model.  Moreover, the effect of the economy on Incumbent parties is largely conditional on their status as New Regime parties, Old Regime partiers, or neither type of party. 

 

If you wish to get in touch with me, you can email me at joshua.tucker_at_nyu.edu
Click here to return to my home page
or here for my CV.