The Monkey Cage

In our continuing series of election reports, we are very pleased to be able to welcome back Kevin Deegan-Krause with a remarkably thorough post-election report on the June 2010 Slovak parliamentary elections (see as well his interview in the Slovak Spectator):

One month after its June 12 elections, Slovakia has a new government. On Friday of last week Iveta Radicova of the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union became the prime minister of a coalition government consisting of four parties with pro-market orientations and relatively moderate views on intra-ethnic cooperation between Slovaks and Hungarians, replacing a coalition of three economically statist parties oriented around the Slovak nation. The new government, and the elections that brought it about, mark two significant “firsts” and a number of other changes that will be important for the region.

Two Firsts

The first “first” for Slovakia is a female prime minister, a particularly noteworthy development because Slovakia has never had a particularly strong representation of women in positions of power. Slovakia differs little from its neighbors in this regard: the Visegrad Four—a regional grouping consisting of Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary—has had only one other female prime minister in the last 20 years (Poland’s Hanna Suchocka in the early 1990’s) and although several of the other countries in the region have had female presidents (Latvia) or Prime Ministers (Lithuania and Bulgaria) women still remain the exception in postcommunist European politics. Indeed the incoming government of the Czech Republic may have no women at all, and despite Radicova’s control of the premiership, her own government will have only one other woman, and Slovakia’s new parliament actually has fewer female deputies than it did four years ago.

The other “first” is more subtle and involves the comparatively brief tenure of the outgoing Prime Minister, Robert Fico. In Slovakia’s first eight years of postcommunism the premiership was dominated by Vladimir Meciar, twice removed by parliament but twice returned by voters; in the next eight years, the seat was occupied without a break by Mikulas Dzurinda. By this standard, Fico is the first elected prime minister in Slovakia whom voters did not immediately reward with a second chance at government. There are several reasons why this might be so. One reason, largely outside the political realm,involves the economic difficulties faced by Slovakia’s export-dependent economy in 2009, an effect exacerbated by the tendencies of voters in postcommunist countries to punish incumbents for whatever might go wrong, a phenomenon that Andrew Roberts of Northwestern describes in terms of hyperaccountability . A more “political” explanation attributes the fall of Fico’s government to voter distaste for a long series of scandals involving government ministers. Both explanations have some purchase, but they need to be understood in the context of intra-party dynamics which I discuss in the next section. Those readers who would prefer dental surgery to a tedious discussion of Slovakia’s intra-party dynamics may skip down to the section “Why should we care” below.

A Tedious Discussion of Slovakia’s Intra-Party Dynamics

How we understand Slovakia’s political shift over the last four years depends heavily on what we are looking for. Analysis tends to settle at one of three levels, all of which have some claim to the truth, provided that we understand the context.

Continue reading "2010 Slovak Parliamentary Elections: Post-Election Report" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Sunday, Bronisław Komorowski, the acting president of Poland, was elected to a full five year term. He defeaeted Jarosław Kaczyński by a margin of 53.01% to 46.99%. Kaczyński was running to succeed his twin brother Lech Kaczyński, who was tragically killed in a plane crash last spring. Excellent coverage of the election can be found on the Gazeta Wyborcza web site, and the results are already available on the home page of the Polish national election commission in Polish and English.

The actual result of the election is largely in keeping with what one would have expected before the plane crash. As I previously posted on the Monkey Cage, Komorowski’s popularity ratings had long out stripped those of both Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, and once he received the nomination of the ruling Civic Platform party, he was widely expected to win the presidential elections, which were originally due to be held this fall.

While scholars of Polish politics will undoubtedly be interested in the dynamics that allowed a candidate of the center-right Civic Platform to become the most popular candidate in the country - especially after the failure of Civic Platform to win the 2005 presidential elections - for political scientists who do not focus specifically on Polish politics this election will likely attract attention in attempts to measure the sympathy effect. Put another way, the big question coming out of this election is not why Komorowski won the election, but rather why he only won by 6% of the vote. Three explanations seem likely:

1. The sympathy effect: here the argument would be that Jarosław Kaczyński was able to do much better than expected because of sympathy on the part of the electorate for the death of his brother. It may be that all policitians are rehabilitated in death (although see here), and it was precisely the death of Lech that lead to Jarosław’s much better than expected performance.
2. The campaign effect: here the argument would be that campaigning against a politician - albeit an unpopular one - who had just lost his twin brother in a national tragedy would be a difficult task for even the most seasoned and polished of policians, of which Komorowski was not. (Having not been in Poland for the campaign, I am relying on second hand accounts of the deficiencies in Komorowski’s campaign; I welcome comments from anyone who has been in Poland on this point.)
3. The polarization effect: here the argument would be that ultimately, Polish politics remains fairly polarized between a kind of traditionalist Catholic electorate and a more pro-European cosmopolitan electorate, and that ultimately any election that got to the second round with one candidate representing each of these forces was going to be somewhat close, just as the 2005 election was close. In this view, a 6% difference between the two candidates wouldn’t be all that surprising even if the plane crash had never happened.

I think trying to sort out the empirical evidence needed to support and falsify these three arguments could make for a very interesting paper.

Continue reading "2010 Polish Presidential Elections" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to welcome Kevin Deegan Kraus, author of the definitve Slovakia blog pozorblog.com, with a pre-election report on today’s Slovak parliamentary elections.

Slovakia holds parliamentary elections today. Incurious readers with busy lives will be pleased to know that it is entirely acceptable not to care: Slovakia is a small country without any natural resources craved by the United States and other Monkey Cage posts this week deal with far more consequential topics, including commentary about Jersey Shore and the tanning tax. Dedicated readers who remain can take solace in the fact that although Slovakia is poor in oil and tanning beds, it is rich in politics. It may not be precisely true that Slovakia is Everywhere as I have claimed elsewhere (with apologies to Mojo Nixon) but political developments in Slovakia repeatedly shed light on complicated processes that are more difficult to study in larger or less accessible countries. In the 1990’s Slovakia illuminated the authoritarian undertow in the third wave of democratization. Recovering its balance in the 2000’s, Slovakia offered a remarkable demonstration of the shift of political competition from national questions to socioeconomic ones and put a spotlight on the political conditions necessary for economic reform. And Slovakia continues to be generous to the political scientists of the 2010s. Although the areas of potential interest are many, three come quickest to mind:

Nationality politics

In late 2009 even Slovakia’s foreign minister acknowledged that his country’s relationship with Hungary could be called “the worst bilateral relationship”:http://euobserver.com/?aid=28640 in the EU. As bad as the relations have become, however, they do not threaten to have much macro-political impact. (Prominent analysts have privately compared Slovakia-Hungary relations to hemorrhoids—embarrassing and painful when inflamed but hardly ever fatal.) While it is a bit ghoulish to neglect the immediate negative impact of recent language laws and citizenship laws and historical revisions on the lives of individual Hungarians and Slovaks, the low likelihood of actual conflict provides political scientists with an opportunity to study the underlying dynamics and in the process perhaps find some signs of hope. It seems at times that identity-related agitation is the gift that national parties of rival countries give one another in secret recognition of their common identity-oriented worldview (in spite of diametrically opposed national goals). Each outburst by a national party prompts an equal and opposite reaction from the neighboring nation or national minority and thereby precisely demonstrates the need to support the national party that made the outburst in the first place. Extremes at both sides gain. Even though this has a deleterious effect on inter-ethnic relations, its rewards for party politics within a particular ethnic group are so apparent that we expect parties to “play the national card” whenever they can, and we further expect that this card will trump all others. Yet we must be careful in our expectations: if the strength of the national card were absolute, then all parties would play this card all the time, but they don’t, and Slovakia provides some insight into the limits of national appeals. It would be incautious to say much more before we see the electoral results, but public opinion polls show that increasing national tensions have not lent significant support to parties with a national orientation. Indeed even the Slovak National Party (SNS), vehemently anti-Hungarian, has gained only a point or so in the final pre-election polls, a shift that counts for little against the party’s loss of six points—more than half of its overall support—in the last two years. National fear is a potent force but must have at least some roots in reality and while “the Hungarian threat” lends itself to rhetorical flourish, it does not seem to connect with voters this year as well as more concrete concerns about floods and jobs and corruption.

Multidimensional party systems

The Monkey Page has recently hosted a fascinating set of discussions about Andrew Gelman’s assertion that “elections are inherently more unstable when more than two candidates are involved. As an observer of countries where the number is more like six, my first reaction was “how quaint,” but I quickly realized that I could ignore the discussion at my own peril because it closely paralleled my interest in dimensions of competition in multiparty systems and my own question about whether simultaneous competition on multiple axes gives leaders a greater degree of freedom in shaping outcomes. One dimensional competition—analogous to competition between two candidates—tends to reinforce fundamental constraints that link parties more firmly to past campaigns and long-standing support from particular demographic groups. Introduce a second dimension and leaders find themselves able to do more than just compete for undecided voters in the middle of the single dimension. Slovakia provides an excellent example of a case in which parties fight both about economic issues and about national ones (and sometimes about cultural ones as well) and in which the most successful ones face a choice about which issue debate would be most advantageous. Indeed it is no surprise that ambitious leaders spend great effort tying to introduce new dimensions (in the US we often refer to them in terms of “wedge issues”) for precisely the purpose of gaining new political options. Without a better understanding of the dimensionality of political competition of the kind we find in Slovakia, we stand little chance of understanding the role of third candidates or even who has an upper hand in two-candidate elections.

New models of party organization

Like business firms and Galapagos finches, political parties continue to evolve in the face of competition, and the race to identify new species is a popular pastime in political science. Beyond the elite parties of the 19th century, the extensively-organized mass parties early 20th century, and the “catch-all” parties of the late 20th century, recent decades appear to have produced several new variants which rely heavily on new approaches to media and organization. Some have followed the lead of business in a variety of ways, emphasizing flexible organization and branding and extending their reach through electronic social media to regain some direct connections with potential voters (though quite different from the in-person contacts of mass parties). While long-established parties have also begun to employ these techniques, the best innovators are the many new parties that have emerged, in countries such as Italy and the Netherlands and particularly in postcommunist Europe. These parties repackage their political inexperience as a central part of their political message in political environments permeated by corruption: We are new, they claim, and therefore clean. Most of these parties do little to build strong internal organization and often rely heavily on one or two prominent leaders from “outside” or “above” the political system, especially journalists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, and nobility. For these same reason, these same parties often have difficulty surviving beyond a single term. Indeed some seem designed from the outset as short term projects. When they fail to stay clean their voters often turn to yet another new alternative. It is not yet clear how long these cycles can continue or how the increasing power of disposable parties will affect the quality of policy or the accountability of political leaders, but Slovakia is a good place to start the study. Slovakia not only has an ample supply of these parties (including several new entrants in 2010) but it also has perhaps the most successful and enduring example of such a party in postcommunist Europe: Robert Fico’s party Smer. Smer will win the greatest number of votes today, but the margin by which it does so, and the consequences for the party if it loses the premiership will help to demonstrate the .

What to look for in Slovakia’s election results

Slovakia’s contribution to these political questions above will remain significant regardless of who wins or loses tomorrow, but for the few readers who are actually interested in the nuts and bolts of Slovakia’s politics (or have now become so), I should offer a few words about what to look for in the election returns. Polls, odds markets and experts all suggest that this election will be one of extremely narrow margins, both because two key parties stand within half a percent of the 5% threshold (and two more within a percent-and-a-half), and because many projections show a difference of only one or two seats in parliament between the current coalition and the opposition. Whatever government is formed, it is likely to be a weak and internally-divided one that will not undertake too many major policy initiatives, but it will still make a difference whether the political initiative remains in the hands of Smer or falls the current opposition. What should a casual bserver watch for?

Overall distribution of votes between blocs:

• Current polls and other analyses suggest 40-45% for the current coalition, around 35% for the current Slovak opposition, and about 11% for the current Hungarian opposition. Anything dramatically different will suggest a

Distribution of votes within blocs.

• Chances for the continuation the current coalition led by Fico’s Smer are about even, but the coalition will have little chance if Vladimir Meciar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) falls below the 5% threshold or if Smer falls below 30%.
• The current Slovak opposition should maintain its 35% but it will make a difference in coalition negotiations whether the top vote getter is the former government leader, the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKU) or the rising Freedom and Solidarity (SaS—one vogue for new parties names appears to be a combination of “This and that” with no mention of “party.” See Poland’s “Law and Justice” and “Left and Democracy” and Bulgaria’s “Order, Lawfulness, Justice.”)
• The chances for an opposition coalition will be harmed significantly if either of the two Hungarian parties—the Party of the Hungarian Coalition (MKP-SMK) or Bridge (Most-Hid)—fail to cross the 5% threshold.

Slovakia’s polls close today at 10pm Central Europe Time / 4pm Eastern Time. Those looking for a quick fix can find my immediate post-election reactons this evening at pozorblog.com (along with longer and even more obsessive past discussions of electoral politics in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and the Eurovision song contest). Everyone else can probably wait for more succinct and reasoned post-election comments that should appear soon in the Monkey Cage just above special section on John McCain’s tweets to Snooki.

****

Note: There was an earlier version of this post that contained some typos - including my misspelling Kevin’s name for the second time in two weeks! - and formatting errors. These have now been corrected in this version, although please note that none of the substantive points or references were changed.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An interesting trend is developing across recent elections in post-communist “Visegrad-4” of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. More specifically, it now seems possible that the right could hold power in all four of these countries simultaneously for the first time since the Polish communist successor party returned to power in 1993.

Poland has had a stable right-wing government since the 2007 parliamentary elections, and indeed one could largely claim that the 2005-2007 government was also by and large right wing (although it certainly had its populist elements as well). Moreover, the ruling party center-right party looks likely to get its presidential candidate elected this month provided the election is not rained out. The more recent trend began in Hungary in April, where the right-wing Fidesz swept into power with a commanding 2/3 majority of the parliament. It then continued in the Czech Republic last month, where, despite the fact that social democratic party won the most seats in election, three right wing parties now control 118 out of 200 seats in the parliament and look likely to form a coalition government.

Intriguingly, the Slovak Spectator now suggests that Slovakia could follow the Czech example and possibly produce a center-right government as well. What makes this case different from the Czech one, though, is that the center-left (and incumbent) SMER party looks likely to enjoy a substantial “victory” in the election, as opinion polls suggest it will win more than twice as many votes as its nearest competitor (in contrast, the Czech left-wing party “won” the election by less than 2% of the vote). While it is still probably an unlikely scenario that SMER will be left out of the post-election government, this raises an interesting question in terms of legitimacy: are voters in Slovakia going to be ready to accept the fact that a party that wins such a commanding victory could not be part of the government? This has happened before in Slovakia - when Vladimir Meciar’s MZDS won the 1998 Slovak elections but was kept out of government - but the margin of victory was tiny, with a single percentage point of vote separating the top two parties.

As for the larger question of this rightward trend in Central Europe, I’m sure it will be easy to write it off (no pun intended) to idiosyncratic factors in each country, e.g., the scandals that plagued the SLD in Poland and MSzP in Hungary, the success of new right wing parties in the Czech Republic, etc. Interestingly, what does not seem to be the case is that “it is a bad time to be an incumbent in an economic crisis” is explaining everything. Post-communist countries are notorious for voting incumbents out of office with a startling degree of consistency (see in particular Andrew Roberts’ piece on “hyperaccountability” in Electoral Studies, available ungated here), and yet the Poles appear to be on the verge of electing a president from the ruling party (although it should be noted that Poland has weathered the economic downturn better than any other European country). Moreover - despite what may happen in post-election coalition negotiations - the Slovaks look very likely to hand a decisive electoral victory to the center-left incumbent SMER.

So it may well turn out to be the case that these are just idiosyncratic events that all happen to produce right-wing governments. On the other hand, as we know from the literature on Latin America, when enough governments in a region trend to either the left or the right, scholars tend to take notice and start trying to explain the trend. I wonder if we are on the edge of such a period in Central Europe.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As promised, here is our election report on the 2010 Czech Elections, courtesy of Professor Andrew Roberts of Northwestern University.

On 28-29 May 2010 Czechs voted for a new parliament. The headline results were a victory for the right which seems likely to form a majority coalition, a surprising defeat for the Social Democrats who were predicted to be win the elections and indeed did come in first but with far less votes than expected, and the success of two new political formations. This summary, however, obscures some of the most interesting aspects of the elections, four of which I would emphasize here.

1. Punishment. Though the elections appear to have yielded a majority right-wing government composed of the Civic Democrats (ODS), TOP 09, and Public Affairs (Veci verejne), voters seemed to be voting against parties more than for them. Of the five parties previously represented in parliament, four saw massive drops in their support and two found themselves outside of parliament (the Greens and the People’s Party). In fact, the People’s Party failed to gain admission to parliament for the first time since WWI. The two major parties, the Social Democrats and Civic Democrats (ODS) saw their vote shares decline, respectively from 32% to 22% and 35% to 20%. Indeed, the Social Democrats were proclaimed the losers of the election despite coming in first and their controversial leader immediately resigned. (The erstwhile head of ODS had been forced out earlier in the spring after impolitic remarks about the Jewish Prime Minister.)

This punishment isn’t too surprising. One would expect voters to be in a punishing mood during an economic crisis which is where the country is today (GDP fell by 4% last year). What was slightly unusual was their willingness to punish all the parliamentary parties (with the exception of the Communists who maintained their 11% share). This is partly due to the severity of the crisis and a sense that the major parties had made themselves too comfortable, but it is also a consequence of the lack of a clear incumbent. The last elections in 2006 ended in an perfectly even 50-50 split between the right and left which was temporarily resolved by defections, but which ultimately ended with a caretaker government that has been running the country for the past year. So rather than simply punishing an incumbent and rewarding the opposition, voters turned against parliament as a whole, a phenomenon that truth be told has been quite common in post-communist Europe.

The dissatisfaction can also be seen in the massive increase in preference voting. Though the Czech Republic uses a standard list PR electoral system, voters can optionally give certain candidates a preference vote which helps them move up the list. The number of preference votes almost doubled compared to 2006 - 3.7 million versus 1.9 million. Voters here seemed to prefer new and uncorrupted faces, particularly of local politicians, and one national leader of ODS even failed to reach parliament despite heading his party’s list.

2. New parties. The lost votes of the existing parties were transferred to several new parties, two of which crossed the 5% for entry into parliament. The biggest success, finishing third with 17% of votes, was TOP 09 (the name is an acronym for Tolerance, Responsibility, Prosperity) which was formed by a former leader of the Christian Democratic People’s Party and the popular scion of a former aristocratic family. The party was thus able to build on traditional blocs (both Christian Democratic and liberal intellectuals) but without being connected to the failures of previous governments.

The other victor was Public Affairs (Veci Verejne or VV) whose public face is a popular journalist/writer, but whose nature is still murky. The party has some right-wing populist traits - it forced its candidates to sign an unconstitutional contract to pay a 7 million crown fine if they don’t vote as the leadership wishes - but it has also insisted on cutting the army’s budget and reallocating the money to education. No one is sure what to expect from VV or what its main backer wants. The desire for new parties extended even beyond these two successes with two other new formations receiving above 3% of the vote but not enough to enter parliament. Altogether there are 114 new faces in parliament compared to only 86 returnees.

3. A majority government. For the first time since 1992, elections have appeared to yield a clear majority government. Together ODS, TOP 09, and VV would control 118 of 200 seats in parliament giving their coalition a comfortable majority. Prior elections have yielded an exactly 50-50 split between left and right (2006), a 50.5% majority spanning left and right (2002), a minority left-wing government supported by the major right-wing party (1998), and a minority right-wing coalition (1996). The main reason for these inconclusive results was the presence of an unreformed communist party which has been viewed as uncoalitionable by the other democratic parties. Though the communists haven’t disappeared, for the first time in a long time, there appears to be a government with a clear mandate.

4. Support for austerity. And what is that mandate? What the three right-wing parties agree on is the need to cut spending and prevent further indebtedness. Surprisingly in the current climate, all three have proposed painful cuts including pension reforms, health care reforms (and retention of unpopular copays), introduction of tuition for university, a reduction in the number of state employees, and a reduction in social benefits and tax exemptions. Their plans thus contrasted dramatically with the Social Democrats’ (and Communists’) promises to increase benefits (for example, by introducing a thirteenth month pension and ending copays). The warning example of Greece, not to mention Hungary and the Baltics, likely played a role in the success of these programs as did Czechs’ traditional fiscal conservatism.

It seems likely then that the new government will introduce a number of potentially unpopular austerity programs intended to forestall a Greek-style collapse and hopefully restore growth. The wild cards are whether the public will accept these cuts which are individually unpopular even after giving parties a mandate to pursue them and whether the government will persist with them even at the cost of its popularity.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are hoping to get a report up on the surprising 2010 Czech Parliamentary Elections Results sometime soon, but for those who can’t wait I wanted to recommend Kevin Deegan-Krause’s Pozorblog which, although normally focusing primarily on Slovak politics, has an excellent series of posts on the recently concluded Czech Elections, including a discussion of why the polls got it wrong.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 06:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More from Benjamin Preisler on the German regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia and the international media’s misinterpretation of these results:

Outside of Germany the important conservative voter loss in North Rhine Westphalia is most often ascribed to the German populace’s distaste over the aid to Greece (see The New York Times, Le Monde, or even academics such as Stephen Walt). This kind of assessment can at best be described as simplistic, at worst it is simply wrong, an impression which is easily be confirmed by a quick look at the polls.

According to the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen (the most important German poll institute) 42% of respondents considered employment the most important subject of these elections, while an astonishing 41% were of the opinion that the education system was the most important issue. Finally, the third-most often named problem was the financial situation of local communes (more than twice removed from the European level) with 17%.

When asked to to estimate the importance of specific topics more than 75% considered education policy to be relevant. Only then followed the Greek crisis with 54% believing it to be an important topic. Lastly, 38% deemed the conservative party’s funding scandals to be truly relevant.

Continue reading "It's Not All Greek to the Germans: More on the North Rhine-Westphalia Election" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The introduction of UK legislation to create fixed-term (5 year) Parliaments is, assuming it becomes institutionalized, a major constitutional reform. But in the short term it is also an enforcement mechanism for the current coalition. The proposed legislation would prevent the Prime Minister from unilaterally deciding to dissolve Parliament and hold a new election - and it would prevent a narrow vote of ‘no confidence’ from doing the same thing. Instead, this would require a supermajority vote in the House of Commons — set at 55%.

That number is notable. After all, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats between them hold, er, 56% of the Commons. So — the LDs are protected in that the Tories can’t dissolve Parliament out from under them in hopes of gaining a majority in their own right. The Tories are protected in that the LDs can’t collude with Labour and the smaller parties along those lines, since that collusion could at best comprise 53% of Commons seats, even making unrealistic assumptions about Northern Irish DUP votes.

Instead, “we will all go together when we go…”

Posted by Andrew Rudalevige at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

We are pleased to welcome back Benjamin Preisler with a post election report on the recent North Rhine Westphalia German regional election:

Elections in Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia) yesterday ended with a a stunning decline for the governing conservative party, the CDU, falling 10.2% to only 34.6% of overall votes. The SPD (the social democrats), while losing a modest 2.6%, just missed out on reclaiming its traditional position as the state’s strongest party winning 34.5%. The biggest winners were the Green party, which more than doubled its share of its 2005 vote going from 5.9% to 12.1%, and the, still relatively new, socialist Left (Die Linke) which for the first time will be represented in North Rhine-Westphalia’s regional parliament. The CDU’s coalition partner, the liberal (in the European, free-market sense) party, the FDP, increased slightly (+0.5%) to 6.7% which in light of the 14.9% it had received in the Land (state) in last year’s national elections constitutes a resounding defeat.

The most important short-term effect for national German politics is the loss for the government of its majority in the Bundesrat (the second chamber) which will put an immediate end to initiatives clamoring for tax reductions and prolonging Germany’s involvement in atomic energy.

International coverage of the elections usually considers this result a reprimand of Angela Merkel’s conservative-liberal governmental coalition in general and her folding in the Greek crisis in particular. This might or might not be true, blunders by the erstwhile Ministerpräsident Jürgen Rüttgers (the regional prime minister) and the regional conservative party definitely played a role as well. Far more interesting for political analysts are the long-run ramifications of the new German parliamentary democracy showcased in these results though.

In the years leading up to Schröder’s election in 1998, German politics had been dominated by the two major all-encompassing parties, the CDU/CSU and the SPD, and the small FDP which served as a junior partner to either. The arrival of the Greens and their stabilization as a parliamentary presence during the 1980s and 1990s in turn created a two-block system with the conservative-liberal model opposing the social democratic-green one. While the latter won twice (in 1998 and 2002) its infamous social reforms (Hartz IV) brought about a fundamental change in German politics; opposition to these policies brought about a merger between the erstwhile communist governing party of the GDR (the PDS) and disappointed social-democrats, unionists, and a wide array of other left-wing splinter groups (the WASG) under the leadership of a former SPD-president, Oskar Lafontaine. The PDS had never succeeded electorally in West Germany even while playing on the same level as the CDU and the SPD in East Germany, since the Left (Die Linke) has become a fixture in German parliaments.

Germany has thus now moved away from its post-war system of a three-party parliamentary democracy allowing for clear majorities towards a five party system posing a variety of coalition building problems. The election results in North Rhine-Westphalia exemplify this problematic. CDU and SPD are even in the Landtag (regional parliament) both having 67 parliamentarians. The Green party boasts of the third-biggest fraction with 23, followed by the FDP and the Left with 13 and 11 parliamentarians respectively.

The erstwhile regional and current national coalition of liberals and conservatives has no majority anymore thus. Neither does the traditional left of centre bloc featuring the SPD and the Greens. The only governmental model of yore possible would be a Grand Coalition. The SPD in this case would most likely not be able to fill the prime minister position as they received – if barely – fewer votes overall. Furthermore, this kind of government has in the past not been popular with either politicians nor the public as it is generally viewed as too consensus-oriented, incapable of making clear-cut discussions.

The Greens have recently been making overtures versus the conservatives and already govern with them in the state of Hamburg. A black-green coalition in a non-city state would be a powerful symbol of a broadening of possible governmental coalitions. Alas, this variety does not hold a majority either and we shall not find out for the time being whether such a coalition truly is an option.

Three possible color combinations remain possible thus, the Jamaican option, red-red-green and a traffic light (die Ampel). The former (black-green-yellow – conservatives-greens-liberals) is currently governing the Saarland but is not particularly popular with either greens or liberals, as both tend to vilify one another – possibly because they compete for a similar – young, educated, successful, urban – electorate. A broad left-wing coalition would be the next feasible option. Yet, the Left, especially in its West German variety, is widely seen as erratic, radical and impossible to govern with. The SPD furthermore holds particular rancor versus the Left as the latter directly eats into the former’s electorate and finally has not given up hope of it disappearing again. Accepting the Left as a coalition partner would in this sense give it unnecessary credence. A traffic light coalition (red-green-yellow) lastly suffers from the same hostility stated for the Jamaican case, while additionally being strongly opposed by most FDP leaders whose deregulation rhetoric permanently clashes with the SPD’s socially protective stance.

Germany thus finds itself in a new phase of its parliamentary democracy with five solidly established parties. New coalition possibles will have to be explored even while the parties and their members still have a hard time accepting the new status quo, insisting on ideologically close-knit two party coalitions that may rarely be possible anymore. It will also be interesting to see whether a system as reliant on compromise-building between the states (whose governments sit in the Bundesrat) and the national government is even viable anymore when an ever wider array of regional government coalitions easily can lead to constant blocking minorities in the Bundesrat.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Last week on The Monkey Cage Professor Ken Benoit predicted the following results for the Hungarian parliamentary election that took place yesterday:

The actual results? Fidesz: 263, MSzP:59, Jobbik: 47, LMP: 16 (plus one non-partisan candidate made it in; as an aside, the Wall Street Journal has the wrong number for the LMP). Very impressive!

Skeptics may note that Ken made his prediction after the first round of the election’s results were known, thus making the forecasting job less difficult. True enough, but here are his predictions from before the first round: FIDESZ: 271, MSzP: 60, Jobbik: 54. Impressive, indeed! And especially so given the complexities of the Hungarian electoral system, which has been called the most complicated in the world.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of our continuing series of election reports, we once again welcome back Laurenz Ennser, a pre-doctoral researcher at the Austrian National Election Study at the University of Vienna, with this report on the now concluded 2010 Austrian presidential elections:

As widely expected, Sunday‘s Austrian presidential election brought an impressive victory for incumbent Heinz Fischer of the Social Democrats (SPOe), gaining 79 percent of the popular vote. With 16 percent, the Freedom Party‘s (FPOe) Barbara Rosenkranz came in second, and Rudolf Gehring of the non-parliamentary Christian Party (CPOe) received five percent and thus finished third.

The fact that three of the five parties in parliament (the conservative OeVP, the right-wing BZOe, and the Greens) did not stand a candidate had two remarkable effects:

1. Turnout dropped to a level before only seen in European Parliament elections. Even after counting in all absentee ballots, almost half of the electorate did not bother to make it to the voting booth today (I am well aware that 53 percent are not considered “low” in other contexts. By Austrian standards, however, they are).

2. Spoiled ballots are on a record high, averaging above seven percent of all cast ballots nationally.

As political scientists we should not be surprised by either outcome: The causes lie in a result which clearly was a foregone conclusion, a significant lack of competition in a lackluster campaign for an office that is of little practical relevance in everyday Austrian politics, and finally the open calls by some conservative leaders to cast spoilt ballots. From a rational choice perspective, at least half of the electorate behaved reasonably. [JT note: For an example of a theoretical argument relating turnout to the “stakes” or an election tested with empirical data from post-communist countries, see this 2009 JOP article I co-authored with Alexander Pacek and Grigore Pop-Eleches.]

Still, the level of turnout varies considerably across the country. The graph below plots the turnout in Austria’s nine states against the SPOe vote share at the last general election in 2008. Clearly, turnout was higher in the SPOe strongholds, while many voters in the traditionally conservative regions of the west (Tyrol and Vorarlberg) did not vote today.

An analysis of voter transitions based on aggregate precinct data showed that more than half of all conservative and right-wing voters (OeVP, FPOe, and BZOe) failed to cast a ballot (the link is here, click the “Wahlerstrome” button and then choose one of the candidates.)

Now, what are the implications of this election result?

Continue reading "2010 Austrian Presidential Election: Post-Election Report" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 03:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Political scientists tend to avoid making explicit predictions about the future. Thus it with great pleasure that we present our newest election report recapping the first round of the 2010 Hungarian Election with an explicit prediction of results - down to actual seat totals - from Professor Ken Benoit, who writes:

On April 11, Hungary went to vote in the first of two rounds of voting spaced two weeks apart. The election pitted the centre-right opposition party Fidesz against the incumbent centre-left Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP). Deeply discredited by a scandal related to disclosures by then-Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany that the Socialists had lied in the 2006 campaign about the state of the economy, as well as an economic crisis that led Hungary to be the first European country to seek an IMF bailout to manage its debt, the Socialists were widely expected to be routed in the elections this month.

The expectation was squarely met. Fidesz, while not quite gaining the 59-60% of the vote predicted by pre-election polls, still managed 52.7% of the list vote compared to the MSZP’s 19.3%. Based on this astonishing result – astonishing because margins of this magnitude are rarely if ever observed in Western democracies – I am forecasting Fidesz to win more than the 258 seats needed to reach the critical “two-thirds” majority of seats in the 386-seat parliament. The two-thirds supermajority is significant because this is the threshold required for constitutional change or change to constitutional-level laws such as the electoral system.

Only two other parties managed to gain enough list votes to be eligible for seats in the electoral system’s list distribution: the far-right Jobbik (roughly, Movement for a Better Hungary) with 16.7% of the vote, and the liberal Lehet Mas a Politika (LMP) – meaning “Politics can be Different” – with around 7.5% of the vote.

The rule to elect Hungary’s 386-member parliament are complicated. The system is based on two ballots, one for direct election of MPs in one of 176 single-member districts, and one for lists in one of 20 list districts. Votes not used to elect MPs in each “tier” are pooled to distribute additional mandates from a national compensation list. Most importantly this means that from the single-member districts, candidates who do not win a seat have their votes pooled for the national list allocation. Originally this feature was designed to mitigate the disproportionality that might be caused by having 176 of 386 seats allocated from single-member districts.

The reason a second round of voting must be held on April 25 is that only candidates winning more than 50% of the vote in the first round of the single-member districts can be declared elected. Any districts where seats are not yet awarded in the first round are decided in a second round of voting two weeks later, in which the top three candidates, plus any other candidate winning at least 15% in the first round, may participate.

On April 11, Fidesz won 119 of the 176 single-member districts in the first round – the only party to do so. Moreover, it led in every undecided single-member district except for one (the Budapest 20th electoral district). Based on previous electoral patterns showing that second-place candidates almost never become first-place winners in the second round, it looks like Fidesz will win every single-member district except one. The last time that a party in Eastern Europe managed to accomplsh this feat, by the way, was when Solidarity contested the 1989 election against the incumbent Polish Communist Workers’ Party.

My forecast is the following, for the final award of seats following the voting to take place on April 25, 2010:

Continue reading "Hungarian Election Prediction: Fidesz will Win a Two-Thirds Majority" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to welcome Benjamin Preisler (who writes for a trilingual blog!) with his take on the recently concluded French regional elections. For what it’s worth, Adam Meirowitz and I have an article in The Journal of Politics in which we present a theory of strategic voting in sequential elections that I believe nicely captures the dynamic Preisler describes in his guest post:

The second round of the elections of regional governments in France this last Sunday, March the 21st finished with an overwhelming victory of the Allied Left (La Gauche Unie). Winning in 21 out of 22 departments, the Grand Slam hoped for on the left was nearly succesful. An explanatory note seems to be in order to put this result into context. France’s 22 regional governments (‘en métropole’ excluding the overseas departments La Réunion, Martinique, Guadelope and Guyane) are elected in two rounds of voting. The first took place on Sunday, the 14th of March. Parties qualify for the second round one week later if they receive at least 10% of the vote. If any party wins more than 50% in the first round then a second round is not held.

While the conservative governmental party UMP (and allies) found itself at the head of the field in nine departments after the first round and only 3% behind the Parti Socialiste (PS), it was clear from the beginning on that this would not necessarily lead to victories in the second round as virtually no reserves were available for the presidential party. While the Left had presented itself for the first round with a wide array of parties ranging from the PS (29,5%) to Europe Ecologie (12,5%) to the Front de Gauche (6,1%, the succesor to – among others – the Parti Communiste Français), the UMP has incorporated most of the moderate right-wing and centrist parties into its fold. Only the liberal (in the European sense), centrist party MoDem under its leader François Bayrou – who had a surprisingly strong showing in the 2007 presidential elections and has since been trying to position himself as an alternative to Sarkozy – has remained independent, but received a disappointing score of a mere 4,3% nationally, only succeeding in one region to reach the second round.

The left-wing parties united then increased their score to an impressive 54,3% in the second round, while the UMP, in most regions one of only three parties remaining, managed to increase its score from the first round by a paltry 10% (from 26,3% to 36,1%) and only avoided the aforementioned Grand Slam of the Allied Left through its victory in Alsace (politically the equivalent of Texas for the Republican Party or Bavaria for the German conservatives) and La Réunion (as a result of local divisions on the left).

The Allied Left (specifically the PS) believes it has taken an important step towards reclamining of the presidency in 2012 then after having lost the last three presidential elections. Martine Aubry seemingly has established herself at the head of the PS after her contested and controversial election to the party presidency. Still, her most prominent rival, Ségolène Royal, winning reelection as the President of Poitou-Charentes with the second-highest score in the country (60,61%) very much remains in the picture. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose; PS infighting will continue. Europe Ecologie which under its charismatic Franco-German leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, had had a tremendous success in the European elections a mere nine months ago has established itself a fixture – as the third most-important party – on the national scene.

Continue reading "2010 French Regional Elections: Almost a Grand Slam" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to welcome Tyson Roberts, a Ph.D. candidate in the UCLA Political Science Department with the following report on the 2010 Togo Presidential Elections:

On Saturday, March 6, Togo’s election commission declared President Faure Gnassingbe the winner of the March 4 presidential election with 1.2 million votes out of 2.1 million cast (60.9% of the total) for his second term in office, following nearly 40 years of rule by his father. Turnout was 64% of registered voters. The primary opposition candidate, Jean-Pierre Fabre of the Union of Forces for Change (UFC), received 34% of the vote (detailed results are available at the commission’s website).

President Gnassingbe is the son of the late Gnassingbe Eyadema, who took the presidency in 1967 in a coup and ruled until his death in 2005, after which the constitution was suspended and Gnassingbe declared president by the army and the ruling party, the Rally for the Togolese People (RPT). In response to domestic and international pressure, Gnassingbe stood for his first election later that year, which he won (amid violence and alleged fraud) with 60.2% of the vote, according to the official numbers. Turnout in 2005 was also the same as it was last week, 64%.

As has been the case in previous elections, the opposition accused the ruling party of fixing the election. One complaint was that military personnel were allowed to vote early. The government responded that the early voting was necessary to enable the armed forces to maintain peace and order during the elections. Furthermore, they claimed that they were successful in doing this without the violence that has marred previous elections, including hundreds killed in the 2005 presidential election, when results were protested by the opposition as fraudulent. Most of the election this year was peaceful, and what conflict did occur was of a decidedly lower magnitude. The day before the election, a throng of RPT supporters met a parade of UFC supporters, “each side claimed victory and heckled one another, all in good spirit and without animosity” (ibid). After the election, protests were small: “Police spokesman Abalo Assih says officers in the capital earlier fired tear gas on some 200 protesters angry that the opposition party was trailing”. International observers said they saw no overt signs of fraud, only some vote-buying.

The opposition has repeatedly suffered (with few exceptions) from an inability to unify behind a single opposition candidate, and the same was true last week. In addition to Fabre for the UFC, Yawovi Agboyibo of the Action Committee for Renewal (CAR) and four minor party candidates contested the election. Perhaps the UFC and CAR, who won 45% versus the RPT’s 39% in the 2007 legislative elections, could have won the presidency if they had agreed to a single candidate. The opposition would have had a chance to unite after an initial round if they had succeeded in convincing the RPT to return to a two-round election system, but the RPT refused, meaning only a plurality remained necessary for victory. The two opposition parties attempted for months to agree on a single candidate, but neither would agree to the other party’s choice. Although the electoral code was amended in 2009 to eliminate the residency requirements that disqualified Olympio in previous contests, he withdrew his candidacy because of health problems, and former party secretary-general Jean-Pierre Fabre stood for the UFC. The CAR’s Agboyibo came in third with 3% of the vote (slightly worse than his 5% third place finish in 2005). In addition to a lack of unity, the opposition parties suffered from inferior resources. For example, “the incumbent toured the country by helicopter, while the other seven candidates had to use modest modes of transport to canvas for votes”.

Continue reading "2010 Togo Presidential Elections" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to welcome this guest contribution by Silja Haeusermann of the University of Zurich. Silja is also a contributor to the new Poli Sci Zurich blog, where this election report is cross posted. Very dedicated readers of the Monkey Cage may also note that this is our first election report on a referendum. I have not been listing referenda in my call for guest posts on elections, but anyone interested in writing on a referenda should feel free to get in touch with me as well.

Learning the hard way?

It is well known that there are people who actually like getting slapped – but it is puzzling to discover such a penchant with the right-wing parties and business organizations in Switzerland. Or then it must be some mixture of naïveté and stubbornness that makes them impermeable to learning any lesson from past failures. The latest slap is the massive (almost 73% of the votes) rejection of occupational pension cutbacks at the polls, in a direct democratic referendum that took place this Sunday March 7th. The result is a downright triumph for the left and trade unions – especially in a country where the combined Left (Social Democrats and Greens) gained less than 30% of the votes in the last national parliamentary elections .

However, the result of the referendum is not at all surprising to anyone familiar with welfare politics in Switzerland (and – for that matter – OECD democracies in general). And it is not – contrary to what the conservative newspaper NZZ, business leaders and right-wing politicians try to argue – the result of a confusing campaign, a “momentary state of uncertainty” among voters or their “denial of reality”. A denial of reality seems rather to be prevailing among the right, which pushed this proposal through parliament and into to direct democratic circus maximus. Indeed, the result of the referendum is exactly what we would expect in the light of the past 15 years of research on welfare politics in the age of austerity. Here’s why.

In the 1990s, Paul Pierson made a huge impact in the field when he explained how difficult it would be for governments to consolidate or retrench existing social policy programs, because these policies (pensions being the best example) create their own support coalition that reaches far beyond the left-wing electorate. On this basis, he predicted policy stability. More recent research, spearheaded by Swiss political scientist Giuliano Bonoli , proved him wrong by demonstrating that reforms could be achieved, under the condition that governments combine cutbacks with elements that benefit the most precarious social groups, mostly low-skilled, young and female voters. In a book that will be out with CUP this month, I have shown that this kind of “package deals” has become a necessary condition for successful pension reforms over the last 20 years, not only in Switzerland, but also in Germany, France and other European countries. The 2003 reform of the pension scheme in Switzerland, for example, did combine the same kind of occupational pension cutbacks that were rejected on Sunday with more generous protection of low-income earners. This combination led to a two-dimensional reform space that allowed for a very broad support coalition among parties and interest organizations of both the left and right (all actors in the green ellipse). The Swiss Union of Trade Unions SGB (the only actor consistently critical of the reform package) had learnt in earlier campaigns that it would be hardly possible to win a popular referendum all on their own, with part of the left supporting the reform. Hence, it refrained from challenging the 2003 proposal in a referendum and the reform could be enacted.

Continue reading "Learning the Hard Way? The March 2010 Swiss Pension Referendum" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 03:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to offer a pre-election preview of the Austrian Presidential elections from Laurenz Ennser, a pre-doctoral researcher at the Austrian National Election Study at the University of Vienna:

Austria 2010 Have: Election. Need: Competition.

On April 25, Austria will hold presidential elections. I’ll start here with a few facts about the somewhat peculiar role of the president in the Austrian political system and then go on to talk about the 2010 election campaign and, most importantly in my view, its implications for the working of the current grand coalition government between Social Democrats (SPO) and Christian Democrats (OVP).

Despite Austria being a parliamentary system of government, the head of state is elected by popular vote, a provision adopted into the constitution in 1929 as a compromise struck between the Social Democrats who advocated a strong parliament and the Christian Democrats who were more sceptical of parliamentary rule (and eventually abolished it in 1933). It is candidates from these two parties, or more precisely, their post-war successors, that have dominated the presidential office ever since.

De jure, the president is a powerful figure in the political system of Austria. He appoints the federal chancellor and his cabinet ministers and has the powers to dismiss them. He even has the right to dissolve the lower house of parliament (though only on request of the cabinet). However, these powers of dismissal and dissolution have hitherto never been used by any federal president. Therefore, the de facto role of the president in Austrian politics is rather limited. After parliamentary elections, the president typically selects a government formateur to start cabinet bargaining. It is mostly in this stage of the political process that the president can and does exercise some authority.

The current president, Heinz Fischer of the Social Democrats (SPO), has been in office since 2004 and seeks to renew his term in April. Two consecutive six-year-terms are allowed. The federal president typically enjoys high popularity amongst voters which is why incumbents seeking a second term have always been successful. In all likelihood, we are not going to see an exception to this rule in 2010. Hence, it comes as no surprise that the second major party, the christian-conservative OVP, recently announced that they will not field a candidate.

So why care about an election that (1) is of little immediate relevance and (2) seems decided long before election day?

There are a number of reasons:

1. Although contested by individuals, Austrian presidential elections closely follow the patterns of partisan alignment. The figure below plots the percentage of votes obtained by SPO-candidate Fischer in 2004 against the SPOs share of votes in 2380 Austrian municipalities. The correlation coefficient is .79. Given this close correspondence, the outcome of the elections clearly bears implications for party competition and strategy on the national stage. It is therefore all the more peculiar that three out of five parliamentary parties (the OVP, the BZO, and the Greens) have decided not to compete for the position of head of state.

2. It has long been foreseeable for the OVP that the chances of beating Social Democrat Heinz Fischer are slim. The only person deemed a possibly serious competitor was Erwin Pršll, OVP state governor of Lower Austria. However, as it happens, Erwin Pršllos nephew Josef Pršll is the current vice-chancellor and federal party chairman. However, having your uncle sit in the president’s office when you would like to become the next federal chancellor might not be such a good idea (although the example of Poland shows that even twin brothers can hold the two highest offices in one country at the same time). Facing this dilemma the OVP chose for the first time since 1945 to abstain from standing or actively supporting a candidate in the presidential election. With the Greens and (most likely) the right-wing BZO also refraining from entering the contest, the race is narrowing down remarkably.

3. This opens up electoral chances for the Freedom Party (FPO) that has promised to provide voters with an alternative to the incumbent on the ballot. Most likely, the FPO’s candidate is going to be Barbara Rosenkranz, currently a state minister. A mother of ten, Rosenkranz not only comes from the ideological core of the FPO but might also be an attractive candidate for conservative OVP voters not willing to support the social democratic incumbent. It seems safe to say that the FPO’s candidacy in the presidential election is to a fair extent aimed at winning over OVP voters. Past candidacies in presidential elections have earned the Freedom Party up to 17 % of the vote. With the OVP not on the ballot, a result in the high twenties seems quite possible for the FPO, although no serious polls have yet been published.

Continue reading "2010 Austrian Presidential Election Preview" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those of you who have enjoyed our series on election reports, this only works if we get volunteers to write these reports. As I laid out in the first post announcing these reports, the idea here is to get real-time analysis (within the first day or two of an election) from a political scientist who is following that election closely because of his or her research. But we do need volunteers to do this, and currently I do not have anyone lined up for elections in the next two months. So here’s the list of upcoming elections. Please email me at joshua dot tucker at nyu dot edu if you are interested in writing guest blogs about any of these elections. We are also happy to have pre-election reports as well.

Thanks!

4 March: Togo, President
6 March: Iceland, Debt repayment referendum
7 March: Iraq, Parliament and Status of Forces Agreement referendum
7 March: Switzerland, Referendum
14 March: Colombia, Parliament
16 March: Guinea, Parliament
20 March: Madagascar, Parliament
5–12 April: Sudan, President and Parliament
8 April: Sri Lanka, Parliament
11 April: Hungary, Parliament (1nd Round)
18 April: Northern Cyprus, President
25 April: Austria, President
25 April: Hungary, Parliament (2nd Round)
April: Laos, Parliament
April: Somaliland, President

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the 2010 Ukrainian presidential elections draw to a close, much of the narrative in the mass media has focused on the implications of the elections for the fate of the Orange Revolution (although an interesting secondary narrative concerns what the election means for Russia). Two stories predominate. The first, as typified by the headline Ukraine Vote Kills Orange Revolution, is that the victory in 2010 of 2005 loser Victor Yanukovych represents a stunning rebuke to the Orange Revolution. The other story is that the very fact that Yanukovych was able to win such a closely fought contest shows that the Orange Revolution has actually succeeded in its real underlying goal of bringing real electoral democracy to Ukraine.

With this as a background, we welcome back Lucan Way to provide guest commentary on the second round of the Ukrainian presidential elections:

The Ukrainian Election: Tymoshenko’s Strong Showing

At first glance, the victory of Victor Yanukovych in the second round of the Ukrainian Presidential election on Sunday marked a stunning rebuke of Yulia Tymoshenko and a remarkable comeback for the much vilified Yanukovych whose efforts to steal the Presidential election in 2004 sparked the Orange Revolution. Yet a closer examination of the results suggests while Tymoshenko failed to mobilize as much support as Yushchenko did in 2004, she did remarkably well for an incumbent given the state of the economy.

In one sense, this election was a remarkable victory for Yanukovych, who gained 49 percent of the vote — 4 points more than in 2004. Yanukovych attracted 25 and 50 percent more votes in central and western Ukraine – the base of support for the orange revolution – than he did in 2004. At the same time, Tymoshenko mobilized just 72% and 79% of the support Yushchenko had attracted in central and Western Ukraine in 2004. Her failure to mobilize this support cost her the election. Had she mobilized 10% more in either Central or Western Ukraine, she would have won the election.

Above all, this election was marked by remarkable cynicism and apathy on both sides. One Ukrainian commentary compared the election to a “choice between rape and robbery”. Combined, Yanukovych and Tymoshenko obtained just over half of all votes in the first round last month– as compared to 80 percent that supported Yushchenko and Yanukovych in the first round in 2004. In the second round this year, turnout – 69 percent – was lower than in the final rounds of Presidential elections in 2004 (77 percent) and 1999 (75 percent). Finally, a larger share of voters (4.4 percent) voted “against all candidates” than in any Presidential election since Ukrainian independence. Support for “against all” was about equal in Yanukovych’s eastern Ukraine (4.2 percent) as in Tymoshenko’s western Ukraine (3.6 percent). In fact, Yanukovych, like Tymoshenko, had trouble mobilizing his base. Thus, he garnered just 86 percent of the votes in he had collected in Eastern Ukraine in 2004 when he lost.

At the same time, Tymoshenko did far better than any incumbent could reasonably expect given the fact that the Ukrainian economy shrank by 15 percent in 2009 (the largest single year decline since 1994). With declining government revenues, Ukraine currently faces imminent bankruptcy. In the face of such a record, Tymoshenko garnered 46 percent of the vote and came 715,000 votes (3 percent) shy of a victory. Few expected her to do so well.

The primary reason for Tymoshenko’s surprisingly strong performance is the persistence of a strong regional divide between a “pro European” western and a “pro Russian” eastern Ukraine. While there are today few substantively important policy differences between the two sides , the country continues to witness some of the most severe electoral polarization in the world. Thus, despite some inroads made by Yanukovych into Western Ukraine, Tymoshenko still captured an overwhelming 79 percent of the vote there – compared to 18 percent in the East. Such regional polarization virtually guarantees that no matter the circumstances, elections in Ukraine will continue to be highly competitive for the foreseeable future.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to have Paul Staniland, a Pre-doctoral Research Fellow at the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies present the following post-election analysis of the 2010 Sri Lankan presidential election:

Sri Lanka’s presidential election, the first since the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009, further entrenched the incumbent government of Mahinda Rajapaksa. Rajapaksa’s major opponent, General (ret.) Sarath Fonseka, was the chief of the army in the victorious struggle against the Tigers but had turned against Rajapaksa when he was stripped of real power after the war. The campaign was ugly and sometimes violent, marked by charges of war crimes, coups d’etat, vote rigging, treason, and corruption. Approximately 800 violent incidents were reported during the course of the campaign. The aftermath of the election included government charges that Fonseka had planned a coup against his government, while Fonseka is reportedly now considering going into exile.

Rajapaksa and his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)-led coalition ultimately took 57% of the vote while Fonseka, the common opposition candidate, won 40%. Despite expectations of a tight contest, Rajapaksa dominated in ethnic Sinhalese areas and thus overcame Fonseka’s higher levels of support in cities and ethnic Tamil and Muslim regions. This map shows the demographic breakdown: Rajapaksa won the Sinhalese-majority southern and western parts of the country, while Fonseka did better in less-populous Tamil and Muslim areas in the north and east. What can we draw from both the process and the outcome of the election?

First, the government and SLFP used state resources and patronage to get out the vote. Fonseka was a threat because he could undermine Rajapaksa’s credit for defeating the LTTE. In response, the Rajapaksa campaign fully exploited the advantages of incumbency, in sharp contrast to a shambolic Fonseka campaign. Organizationally, the SLFP’s patronage machine was highly effective at mobilizing rural voters and at pulling away defectors from the opposition. Crucially, Rajapaksa’s campaign skillfully exploited its position in power. Rajapaksa was portrayed in the state media as the prime reason for the destruction of the LTTE while Fonseka’s gaffes on the campaign trail were ideal fodder for criticism and often-dubious accusations. Rajapaksa offered a clear Sinhalese nationalist political line that was linked to economic development promises. The election commissioner publicly protested these irregularities, but there is no evidence of massive vote rigging.

Continue reading "2010 Sri Lankan Presidential Election: Post-Election Report" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to have Juan Pablo Luna and Sergio Toro Maureira writing on the recent Chilean elections:

On December 13, 2009, seven millions Chileans went to the polls to elect the president who will run the country from 2010 to 2014. Although no candidate reached the absolute majority, for the first time since democratization, the Concertación (CPD), ruling the country since 1990, came out second (obtaining 29,6%) and trailing by far the right-wing candidate, Sebastián Piñera (44,05%). Piñera was finally elected President in the runoff election with the support of the Alianza por Chile and its two historical parties, Renovación Nacional-RN and the UDI. The explanation of CPD´s vote decrease in the first round was that three former politicians of the Concertación (Eduardo Frei, Marco Enríquez-Ominami, and Jorge Arrate) competed for the center-left vote. The official candidate of this coalition (Eduardo Frei) received a serious challenge from Marco Enríquez-Ominami, a congress-member of the Partido Socialista, who ran the most successful independent campaign in the post-1990 period, and was able to rally 20,13% of the first round vote, under a renovating and anti-traditional politician campaign. Jorge Arrate, a former minister of Patricio Aylwin (Education Minister) and Eduardo Frei (Labour Minister), also obtained historic numbers for the Pacto Juntos Podemos (in which the Communist Party is the central player), reaching 6,21%.

At the same time, there was a complete renewal of the lower-chamber (120 seats) and 47% of the senate (18 seats were replaced). This time, 94 of incumbent deputies ran again (78%) to the chamber and 77 of them (64%) was reelected, maintaining a historical renewal average of 36%. The failures of independent candidates without pact affiliation, and particularly, the defeat of all congressional candidates aligned with the relatively successful presidential candidacy of Enríquez-Ominami, demonstrated once again the efficiency of the binominal electoral system in benefiting the two mainstream electoral pacts (the Alianza and the Concertación) to the detriment of independents. This was further confirmed by the election of three Communist Party representatives as a result of the implicit electoral pact (pacto por omisión) between that party and the Concertación, which sacrificed its own candidates in those districts to enable the election of Communist ones. Beyond penalizing independents, concentrating competition within each electoral pact, and disproportionately allocating seats in regard to the popular vote, the binominal system also confirmed its importance for centralizing power at the top of each political party. The power to nominate, which sometimes acts as a power to virtually elect a candidate, continues to depend on top party leaders and is one of the mechanisms through which political parties in Chile have coped with party-organization sclerosis and centrifugal trends. This has enabled the Concertación for instance, to maintain its congressional candidates aligned with the presidential candidacy of Eduardo Frei, resisting unofficial endorsements by the candidacy of Enríquez-Ominami, in the midst of an inauspicious scenario regarding the presidential race.

Continue reading "Presidential and congressional elections in Chile, December 2009 and January 2010" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nimmi Gowrinathan, the Director of South Asia Programs at Operation USA and a Phd Candidate in the Department of Political Science at UCLA, will be writing a post-election guest post for us in our election reports series later this week. In the meantime, she has a preview of the election at The Huffington Post. It begins as follows:

On May 19, 2009 the Government of Sri Lanka announced that it had defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), ending one of the longest civil wars in South Asia. The legitimacy of this victory for President Mahinda Rajapaksa could only be measured in the ability of the ethnic Sinhalese majority to address the political grievances of the ethnic Tamil minority (300,000 of whom were isolated in internment camps). In late November, when then-Army Commander General Fonseka announced his bid for President, credit for the victory (and responsibility for its aftermath), was suddenly divided. It is within the slim cracks of this divide that a new political space has emerged, offering some hope for the articulation of minority interests at the national level.

Continue Reading The Space Between Politics and Reality: A Minority View of the Sri Lankan Elections

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are very pleased to have Lucan Way of the University of Toronto provide the following commentary on last weekend’s first round of the Ukrainian presidential election:

The first round of Ukraine’s Presidential election, which reunited all of the major participants of the Orange Revolution save Leonid Kuchma, revealed major changes but some important similarities in the political system that existed in 2004.

The most important and encouraging change has been the introduction of functioning democratic institutions. Relative to 2004, media was much more open and diverse (if highly partisan) and electoral fraud was largely absent. Perhaps even more remarkably, the first round suggests that the use of state or “administrative resources”by incumbents no longer yields the same benefits it once did. Most strikingly, access to state resources by President Viktor Yushchenko translated into just 5 percent of the vote – a result that may be the worst performance by an incumbent in modern democratic history. Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who had backed Yuschenko in 2004 but now ran against him, did much better with 25% — enough to get into the second round with Viktor Yanukovych. However, she does not seem to have benefitted significantly from state access. Tymoshenko arguably bet heavily on administrative resources when she decided to become Prime Minister in late 2007 at which point there were already signs of an impending economic downturn in Ukraine. Given, her overwhelming desire to become President, Tymoshenko might have chosen to stay in opposition and let others take the blame for Ukraine’s 14 percent economic decline in 2009. Tymoshenko’s decision makes sense in light of the rules of the game that had dominated under Kuchma. Until 2004, access to the government had been a sine qua non for political viability. A government position was about the only way candidates could gain the necessary patronage, organizational resources and media attention necessary to mount a serious campaign.

However, in what is a very good sign for Ukrainian democracy, Tymoshenko appears to have suffered far more as an incumbent who had to take the blame for Ukraine’s dismal economic performance than she benefitted as a government official able to use of state resources to bolster her support. A preliminary picture of the relative benefits of administrative resources emerges from a comparison of her performance last Sunday with her party’s performance in 2007 parliamentary elections and Yushchenko’s performance in the first round of the Presidential election in 2004 when he suffered significant disadvantages. Overall, she got 5 percent less than her party did in 2007 and about 15 percent less than Yushchenko did in 2004. Administrative resources may have contributed to slightly improved performance in several eastern provinces, where Tymoshenko did better than in previous years. But, these regions were still overwhelmingly dominated by Yanukovych as in both 2007 and 2004.

Continue reading "2010 Ukrainian Presidential Election: Round 1" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are pleased to present post-election analysis of 2009 Romanian presidential elections from Aurelian Muntean, Grigore Pop-Eleches, and Marina Popescu. Some combination of the members of this team will also be writing about this election for Electoral Studies’ Notes on Recent Elections in the future:

The second round of the Romanian presidential elections took place on 6 December (the first round was on 22 November). Yet, final results were announced only on Monday the 14th of December due to a legal dispute over electoral fraud claims by the challenger, Mircea Geoana from the PSD (Social Democratic Party). The incumbent president Traian Băsescu obtained 5,275,808 votes (50.3%), while Mircea Geoană won 5,205,760 votes (49.7%), which means that 70,048 votes out of 10,481,568 valid votes made the difference between winner and looser. It is the closest Romanian presidential election result after the close election of President Basescu in 2004 (51.2%). Moreover, it was the first Romanian election (and perhaps one of a handful of examples worldwide) where the overall outcome was decided by the diaspora, which preferred Basescu by a margin of almost 85,000 votes (i.e. more than the overall winning margin.)

The results were somewhat surprising because three of the four exit polls gave Geoana as the winner by a small margin. Not surprisingly, this led to divergent interpretations: Geoana and the PSD complained about widespread fraud, while President Basescu claimed that some of the institutes running the exit polls were biased in favour or Geoana. At least part of the divergence was due to the fact that exit polls were conducted only in Romania and only one of them dared to forecast on a hunch that in such a close election the votes from abroad could be decisive. More importantly, the results were surprising because there was a broad anti-Basescu coalition, which at least mathematically had the upper hand. After the first round of the elections (see this post) in which the difference between the vote for the incumbent and the challenger was very small (32.4 to 31.1), the liberal candidate (Crin Antonescu) who came in third with approximately 2 million votes (20%) decided to support the challenger and together had embraced the liberal proposal for PM in the person of the popular mayor of Sibiu.

At 57.9%, turnout was higher than at the first round (54.4%) and higher than in the second round of 2004 (55.2%). This turnout increase suggests that the high stakes of an emotionally charged and very close election outweighed the potentially demobilizing effects of widespread political disaffection registered in the last few years as a result of a string of political scandals and a deep economic crisis. Turnout increased most spectacularly in the diaspora, where it was 50% higher than in the first round. Some political commentators have argued that there was a lot of online mobilization in the two weeks between the two rounds and that after knowing the exit poll results that gave Geoana a slight edge, Romanians abroad, preponderantly anti-communists, turned out in bigger numbers. However, such an account is at odds with the fact that the highest increase (almost 100%) occurred in Spain and Italy, where the time difference is just one hour and where most migrants are more recent lower-income and less educated job seekers. Instead, it is possible that diaspora voters, who in the absence of mail-in absentee voting often have to travel considerable distances to the nearest polling station, may have decided strategically to “save” their vote for the second round, since there was less uncertainty about the outcome of the first round .

Continue reading "2009 Romanian Presidential Elections" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are again pleased to have Gregory Weeks provide post-election analysis of the first round of the 2009 Chilean presidential and legislative elections:

In Chile, there will be a second round on January 17. Sebastián Piñera received 44%, to Eduardo Frei’s 29.6%, with MEO at 20% and Jorge Arrate with 6.2%.

MEO announced that he would not endorse either candidate, though made it clear he preferred that Piñera did not win. Jorge Arrate indicated he would support Frei, but with conditions.

Neither coalition gained a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. The Concertación won 54 seats, in addition to the three seats of the Communist Party, with which it ran in alliance. The right now has 58 of the 120 seats. A similar dynamic holds in the Senate. No coalition has a majority: the right now has 17 seats and the Concertación holds 19. However, Alejandro Navarro from the MAS Party leans clearly toward the Concertación (though he campaigned with MEO).

A few quick thoughts:

First, the campaign will be nasty, brutish, and short. Piñera’s lead is significant, but there will be a fight for MEO’s supporters. Piñera and Frei almost immediately insulted each other, while MEO insulted both.

Second, the Concertación is down but not yet out. The coalition was sagging under its own weight after 19 years in the presidency, but the center-left split at the presidential level did not damage its legislative results (see Matthew Shugart for a pre-election discussion of this point). The binomial system still provides a strong incentive to remain in a coalition.

Third, change is in the air no matter who wins the presidency. In the Chamber of Deputies over one-third (45 of 120) of the winners were elected for the first time, with diverse platforms. Many of those new faces are from the right. The conservative Independent Democratic Union had the most at 13, followed by National Renovation with 8.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once again, we welcome Gregory Weeks, this time with pre-election analysis of Sunday’s 2009 Chilean elections:

For Sunday’s elections in Chile the key question is whether the right can finally win the presidency. In every election since the return to democracy in 1990, the center-left “Concertación” coalition has won. For the past two elections, however, it has faced a second round after each candidate (Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet) failed to win a majority in the first.

Rumors of the Concertación’s death have often been greatly exaggerated, but the conservative “Alianza” coalition has a very good chance of winning. The Concertación’s approval rating is abysmal at 28%. President Bachelet’s personal approval is at 77%, but she has generated no coattails. Chileans credit her (along with Finance Minister Andrés Velasco) with sound fiscal policies that helped the economy weather the global recession, but that good will does not spread to the coalition. (For more on the Bachelet administration, in the shameless plug department I co-edited a book on that topic with Silvia Borzutzky, which will be out next year).

The Concertación’s candidate is Eduardo Frei, who was previously president from 1994-2000 and is currently a senator from the Christian Democratic Party. His campaign has widely been viewed as lackluster, to the point that at various times earlier this year he felt compelled to “re-start” it, perhaps because no one had noticed he had launched it in the first place. He should therefore be an easy target.

But not quite so fast.

Continue reading "2009 Chilean Election Preview" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Once again, we welcome Gregory Weeks with post-election analysis of the Honduran presidential elections; for more, see his blog Two-Weeks Notice: A Latin American Politics Blog.

Although the final numbers have not yet been released, National Party candidate Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo has been reported as winning the Honduran presidential election by a large margin. He won 57.74%, while the Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos garnered 32.94%. (See here for my election preview.)

That result is no surprise, as Lobo had been leading for months. More in doubt was turnout, since Mel Zelaya’s supporters had called for a boycott. But the Supreme Electoral Tribunal has projected 61% turnout, a sharp increase over the 2005 presidential election, which was 45%. Voting is obligatory in Honduras, so some voters may have cast an invalid ballot to protest while not violating the law, but there are no initial numbers in that regard.

Continue reading "Honduras 2009 Post-Election Report" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As part of our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to have Trey Causey of the University of Washington provide the following update on this Sunday’s Tunisian elections. As always, we continue to look for people to provide reports on other forthcoming elections. Here is Trey’s report:

Tunisians re-elected President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali to his fifth term on Sunday, October 25th, capturing 89.62% of the vote with 4,238,711 votes, according to official sources. The result was widely regarded as unsurprising and indicative of the degree to which Ben Ali controls political outcomes in the country. Although three additional candidates opposed Ben Ali in the election, only one candidate, Ahmed Ibrahim, represented anything that could legitimately be called opposition. The remaining two candidates, Mohamed Bouchica and Ahmed Inoubli, voiced their support for Ben Ali, although they managed to capture 5.01% and 3.80% of the vote, respectively. The opposition candidate, Ahmed Ibrahim of the Movement Ettajdid (Renewal), captured a mere 1.57% of the total with 74,257 votes. Turnout was reported as approaching 90% of eligible voters.

Parliamentary elections were also held for the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house. Tunisiaian law dictates that the party that wins a simple majority of votes shall receive 75% of the total seats in the Chamber. The President’s party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) unsurprisingly captured 84.59% of the vote and retain control of the chamber with 161 seats. Twenty-five seats had been added to the Chamber since the 2004 general elections; sixteen of these went to the RCD. The remaining fifty-three seats were distributed among the Movement of Socialist Democrats (16 seats), the Party of People’s Unity (12), the Unionist Democratic Union (9), the Social Liberal Party (8), the Green Party for Progress (6), and the Movement Ettajdid (2). Of these parties, only Ibrahim’s Renewal Movement could seriously be called an opposition party; further, despite the increase in available parliamentary seats, Renewal conceded one of their three seats won in the 2004 Chamber of Deputies. Members of the upper house, the Chamber of Councilors, are seated by selection, with the vast majority of these seats appointed directly by the President or by members of the RCD-controlled lower-house.

Despite the one-sided outcome, the results pose some interesting questions for observers of elections in authoritarian states in general and in North Africa in particular.

Continue reading "2009 Tunisian Presidential and Parliamentary Elections" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A little more than a month ago I announced a new Monkey Cage initiative to provide timely analysis by political scientists of international elections. I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight the fact that we’ve now had reports on recent elections in Japan, Norway, Germany (both pre and post election analysis), Portugal, Greece, and Ireland. For anyone who didn’t get a chance to see them originally, they are all worth reading. One highlight: apparently the left is not quite dead in Europe (something we might not have realized from just following French, German, and British politics….).

To all those who have contributed to the series, let me again offer my thanks. To everyone else out there with regional or country-level expertise who likes to follow elections, please email me at joshua dot tucker at nyu dot edu if you are interested in writing reports. Graduate students who are on the ground doing field research: this includes you! We’ve got the following elections coming in 2009, and it would be great to get reports on as many of these as possible. To date, we’ve only got reports lined up for Honduras and Chile, so there are lots of opportunities for guest post remaining!

Remaining elections in 2009:

• 20 October: Niger, Parliament
• 25 October: Tunisia, President and Parliament
• 25 October: Uruguay, President and Parliament
• 28 October: Mozambique, President and Parliament
• October: Moldova, President (indirect)
• 7 November: Northern Mariana Islands, Governor and Legislative
• 22 November: Romania, President (1st Round)
• 27–28 November: Namibia, President and Parliament
• 29 November: Comoros, Parliament
• 29 November: Côte d’Ivoire, President
• 29 November: Equatorial Guinea, President
• 29 November: Honduras, President and Parliament
• 29 November: Switzerland, Referendum
• 6 December: Bolivia, President and Parliament
• 6 December: Romania, President (2st Round, if necessary)
• 13 December: Chile, President and Parliament
• 12 December: Abkhazia, President (1st Round)
• 27 December: Uzbekistan, Parliament

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In our continuing series of election reports from political scientists, I am pleased to present the following guest post from Stratos Patrikios and Georgios Karyotis of the Department of Government, University of Strathclyde:

The Greek parliamentary election of 2009 took place on October 4, two years ahead of schedule. The Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) returned to power after five-and-a-half years of conservative administration by New Democracy (ND). The early dissolution of parliament has become the norm in Greek politics since 1974, with elections called early, usually in order to serve the incumbent’s electoral prospects. In the September 2007 election, New Democracy had renewed its electoral mandate on the basis of a sound economic performance and trust in Prime Minister’s Costas Karamanlis leadership skills. On the other hand, defeat had left PASOK in turmoil. While its leader, George Papandreou, successfully bounced off challengers to his leadership in nationwide elections in November 2007, questions over PASOK’s unity allowed the left-wing party SYRIZA to reach historically high levels of public support. Despite its weak majority of 152 in a 300-strong Parliament, ND remained ahead in the polls until the autumn of 2008 (see graph, data from Public Issue, website in greek):

However, ND failed to deliver on its reform plans in education, social security and public sector downsizing, amidst economic underperformance, internal opposition, as well as violent street protests. Karamanlis’ promise to restore public faith in the political system was further hampered by a string of corruption scandals, which involved high profile cabinet members. The slow reflexes of the PM to assume responsibility and isolate those implicated during his annual address at the International Exhibition in Thessaloniki in September 2008 proved a crucial turning point. PASOK overtook ND in the polls, while SYRIZA’s support gradually deflated. Meanwhile, the downturn in the global economy had affected the key sectors of tourism and shipping, bringing Greece to the brink of recession.

Continue reading "2009 Greek Parliamentary Elections" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As most watchers of European politics probably know already, Ireland has just passed a constitutional referendum allowing it to accede to the Lisbon Treaty by a whopping majority of 67%. This is surprising, given that a similar vote last year (some small concessions were made in the meantime by Ireland’s EU partners) saw the Lisbon Treaty being rejected by a 6% margin. So what changed in the meantime?

Unfortunately, we don’t have any very good evidence from opinion poll crosstabs, exit polls etc. It may be that someone has conducted a flash poll in the aftermath of the referendum (Eurobarometer did this last time), which may provide a little more data. In the meantime, my thoroughly non-scientific, open to challenge etc rough ranking of the plausible reasons why it was different this time around.

(1) Better campaigning by the Yes side. In the last referendum, while the main political parties advocated a Yes vote (with the exception of the Greens, who were more or less in favor), they didn’t exert themselves especially hard to persuade voters until the closing days of the campaign, when it was too late. This time around, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Yes campaign was much better organized. It also had a single - and very articulate - spokesperson in the form of Pat Cox, former president of the European Parliament.

This was important, because the flash survey last time around suggested that the most important reason why people voted No was because they did not know enough about the Treaty (11% of No voters actually thought that the referendum would, on balance, be good for Ireland). The No campaign did an excellent job of convincing voters that if they did not understand the Treaty, their default position should be to vote No. They pointed out that Ireland would still continue to be a member of the EU. Pro-Treaty politicians did little to explain the Treaty’s presumed benefits - largely because they did not themselves have an especially good understanding of the Treaty, instead relying on generic nostrums about how good Europe had been for Ireland in the past. This time, in contrast, the Yes campaign did a better job in explaining what the Treaty did, and, more importantly, what it did not do, aggressively targeting some of the bogus claims that No proponents had made about abortion, minimum wages etc.

Campaigning effects often wash out in electoral politics, because both sides have similar incentives to win, and to organize as best they can. Here, in contrast, we saw a referendum where one side was far more organized than the other in the initial Lisbon vote, but where these differences evaporated in the second vote (where, if anything, the Yes side was better organized than the No side).

(2) Increased turnout. There was a significant increase in turnout from 53.1% last year to 58% this time around. We don’t have any data on who turned out this time who didn’t the last time, or vice versa. My best guess would be that we saw substantially increased turnout among middle and upper class voters (who are far more likely to favor the Yes position), and static or decreased turnout among working class voters (who are more likely to favor the No position in relative terms). My guess is based on the seat-of-the-pants perception that the salience of the vote was higher among middle class voters than last time round, and that working class voters had other things to worry about given (3).

(3) A change in economic circumstances. Ireland’s GDP is predicted to shrink by anything up to 12% this year, in contrast to last year when the vote was taken just before the economic crisis began to bite. This may be one reason for changing patterns in turnout (working class voters are more likely to be hurt by the recession, and hence perhaps less likely to vote). But it also may have decreased voters’ willingness to ‘go it alone’ against the rest of the EU. Elite consensus seems to have hardened around the opinion that Ireland would have been far worse affected by the recession had it not been an EU member. You could argue this both ways on the empirical merits - while liquidity support from other member states surely helped, a stringent monetary policy probably hurt and will continue to hurt Ireland (Iceland, which was far worse affected initially, may end up recovering more quickly). But whether the belief was justified or not by facts, it plausibly had significant ideological consequences, perhaps shifting the default position for many voters from ‘No’ to ‘Yes.’ Perhaps voter irrationality - the quick succession of an extremely severe recession after the last vote, had psychological consequences too.

(4) Perhaps most interesting was the effect which did not bark in the event. As best as we can guess, voters who blame the (extremely unpopular) government for the current economic crisis did not vote No as a protest against the government in anything like the numbers one might have expected. The referendum carried by an extremely wide margin, even against the backdrop of recession and a deeply unpopular bailout of the banks. This is surely in part due to the fact that the major opposition parties supported the referendum too. But it is surprising to me that there was not more evidence of a generic anti-system vote under the circumstances.

Again, take this all this analysis with a grain of salt - in the absence of proper data it is somewhere between loose hypothesizing with big fat ecological problems, standard-issue punditizing and sheer guesswork. But until and unless actual data becomes available, educated guesswork may be the best we can do.

Posted by Henry at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)