Review of Post-Communist Welfare Pathways: Theorizing Social Policy Tranformations in Central and Eastern Europe

Un des piliers fondamentaux et une source de légitimité essentielle dans l’ancien bloc soviétique a été un système social extrêmement généreux. La transformation des États providence a donc été l’un des enjeux majeurs de la transition politique de l’après 1989, d’autant plus que les populations ont dû faire face à des risques inconnus sous le communisme, tels que le chômage et la pauvreté de masse (...)

Does Democratic Consolidation Lead to a Decline in Voter Turnout? Global Evidence Since 1939

This article challenges the conventional wisdom that democratic consolidation depresses voter turnout. Studying democratic legislative elections held worldwide between 1939 and 2015, it explains why voting rates in new democracies decrease when they do, how much they decrease, and how this phenomenon relates to the voter decline observed in established democracies. The article identifies three main sources of decline. The first and most important is the democratization context. When democratizations are opposition-driven or occur in electorally mobilized dictatorships, voter turnout is strongly boosted in the founding democratic elections. As time passes and the mobilizing democratization context loses salience, voting rates return to normal, which translates into turnout declines. The second source is the democratic consolidation context, which seems to depress voter turnout only in post-Communist democracies. Finally, new democracies mirror established democracies in that their voting rates have been declining since the 1970s, irrespective of the two previous mechanisms

Review of The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe

La fin de la deuxième décennie de l’après- 1989 a vu paraître un nombre significatif d’ouvrages dédiés à l’espace postcommuniste qui tirent un bilan de la période écoulée. Le livre d’Andrew Roberts en fait partie et s’attaque à un sujet polémique. Il se penche sur la question de la qualité de la démocratie dans les pays postcommunistes membres de l’Union européenne et en propose une vision étonnement positive, qui contraste fortement avec les interprétations existantes (...

Review of Elections and Democracy after Communism?

À l’aube du 21e siècle, les élections jouent un rôle fondamental dans le fonctionnement des systèmes politiques à travers le globe. Elles sont imposées comme une source incontournable de légitimité démocratique des gouvernants dans presque toutes les entités étatiques ou infraétatiques, quelle que soit la nature de leurs régimes politiques. La variété de ces derniers est particulièrement riche dans l’espace postsoviétique. Ce sont les processus électoraux de cette région, située en partie en Europe mais surtout en Asie, qui sont étudiés par Erik S. Herron (...)

Russia and the rogue intellectuals

This journal article has not gone through a peer-review process but has been assessed through editorial review (undertaken by a member of the journal's editorial staff).Several prominent western intellectuals blame Russia’s war on Ukraine on the United States and NATO. These include the linguist Noam Chomsky, the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, and the political scientists John Mearsheimer. This article explains why their accounts are deeply flawed on factual, scientific and moral grounds. It goes on to argue that, by defending their ill-conceived and scientifically unsound theses, these intellectuals play into the hands of the Kremlin’s propaganda and legitimatize Russia’s invasio

Distant souls: post-communist emigration and voter turnout

This article tackles the question of transnational electoral participation resulting from emigration. Drawing on several strands of political science literature, the theoretical section explains why emigration is likely to be detrimental to migrants’ voting rates, which specific factors may affect these rates’ variation and, overall, when and how emigration impacts nationwide voter turnout. The theory is then tested using original datasets on emigration, legal provisions for external voting and external voting rates in 10 Central and East European post-communist democracies (CEE-10). The results confirm that external voting rates are much lower than domestic ones and reveal that their cross-national and over-time variation can be, to a large extent, explained by legal provisions for external voting and diaspora size. As a corollary of the weak transnational participation, emigration accounts for approximately one tenth of the fall in voter turnout that has occurred in the CEE-10 since the early 1990s

The decision to vote or abstain in the 2014 European elections

The article examines the individual decision to vote or to abstain in the 2014 European elections in seven Member States of the EU. We focus on the role of socio-demographic characteristics and attitudinal factors. The empirical analysis draws upon the Comparative EU Election Dataset with 22 000 observations. The main finding is that the explanatory factors that account for participation in European elections hardly differ from those that explain participation in national electoral contests. One difference pertains to the existence of a slight gender gap in the European elections. We also find that European identity favours electoral participation while the perceived performance of the EU exerts no effect. Last but not least, there are no systematic cross-country differences in the determinants of individual turnout between the “North” and the “South”, or the original and more recent EU Member States.Le présent article interroge la décision individuelle de voter ou de s’abstenir aux élections européennes de 2014 dans sept pays membres de l’UE. Nous nous focalisons sur le rôle des caractéristiques démographiques et des attitudes. L’analyse empirique s’appuie sur les données du Comparative European Union Election Dataset qui comporte 22 000 observations. Nous démontrons que les facteurs qui expliquent la participation aux élections européennes diffèrent à peine de ceux qui expliquent la participation aux élections nationales. Une différence tient à l’existence d’un écart entre hommes et femmes dans la participation aux européennes. Nous trouvons également que l’affirmation d’une identité européenne favorise la participation tandis que la performance de l’UE, telle que perçue par les répondants, n’a pas d’impact. Enfin, il n’y a pas de différences dans les déterminants du vote entre le « Nord » et le « Sud » ou entre les pays membres fondateurs et ceux qui ont adhéré plus récemment

The Chicken and Egg Question: Satisfaction with Democracy and Voter Turnout

Political scientists, analysts and journalists alike have long believed that the degree of satisfaction with the functioning of democracy determines voter turnout. We use survey data from 24 panel studies to demonstrate that this causal relationship is actually reversed: voter turnout affects satisfaction with democracy. We also show that this reversed relationship is conditioned by election type, electoral system, and election outcomes. These findings are important because: (1) They question conventional wisdom and a large body of scientific literature; (2) They invite a more nuanced approach towards the study of the relationship between evaluations of regime performance and political participation; and (3) They emphasize the vital role of elections in shaping citizens’ perception of the democratic process

The Generational and Institutional Sources of the Global Decline in Voter Turnout

Why has voter turnout been declining in democracies all over the world? This article draws on findings from micro-level studies and theorizes two explanations: generational change and a rise in the number of elective institutions. The empirical section tests these hypotheses along with other explanations proposed in the literature (shifts in party/candidate competition, voting age reforms, weakening group mobilization, income inequality, and economic globalization). We conduct two analyses. The first analysis employs an original data set covering all post-1945 democratic national elections. The second studies individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and American, British, and Canadian national election studies. The results strongly support the generational change and elective institutions hypotheses, which account for most of the decline. These findings have important implications for a better understanding of the current transformations of representative democracy and the challenges it faces

Election Frequency and Voter Turnout

In recent decades, liberal democracies have considerably expanded the scope for citizen participation, calling their citizens to vote in a growing number of popular votes. This research investigates the effects of the rising election frequency on electoral participation. It expands on the voting calculus and theorizes which, when, and how past votes affect current voter turnout. We argue that all election types contribute to a common factor of election frequency, whose high values depress turnout and reduce the effectiveness of party mobilization even in the most important elections. We find support for the new theory using an original database of all significant elections and referendums held in 22 European democracies between 1939 and 2019, two natural experiments, and survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Our findings shed light on contemporary participation trends and have major implications for democratic citizenship and democratic institutional engineering