Regional Economic Voting
Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, 1990–1999

This is the first book length study of economic voting outside of established democracies.

Joshua A. Tucker (Author)

9780521856607, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 January 2006

444 pages, 115 tables
23.6 x 16 x 2.9 cm, 0.706 kg

"In this outstanding new study, Joshua Tucker evaluates the economic voting literature in light of the postcommunist evidence and in doing so turns much of it on its head....Regional Economic Voting is a shining example of how to design a monograph in a way that derives maximum theoretical leverage from a body of evidence while cautiously keeping one’s conclusions as close as possible to this evidence. This book is a remarkable achievement and will be widely read."
Neil Abrams, University of California, Berkeley, Comparative Political Studies

This study demonstrates that in a time of massive change characterized by the emergence of entirely new political systems and a fundamental reorganization of economic life, systematic patterns of economic conditions affecting election results at the aggregate level can in fact be identified during the first decade of post-communist elections in five post-communist countries: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. A variety of theoretical arguments concerning the conditions in which these effects are more or less likely to be present are also proposed and tested. Analysis is conducted using an original data set of regional level economic, demographic, and electoral indicators, and features both broadly based comparative assessments of the findings across all twenty elections as well as more focused case study analyses of pairs of individual elections.

1. Introduction
2. Economic conditions and election results
3. Comparative cross-regional analysis
4. Paired case studies
5. The incumbency hypothesis
6. The new regime hypothesis
7. The old regime hypothesis
8. Comparative analysis
9. Economic voting and post-communist politics.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Comparative politics [JPB], Regional studies [GTB]