Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories in Southeast Europe: (Non-)Believers, Social Network Bubbles, and the Discourse of Blame

in Problems of Post-Communism (2022)

Using survey and social network evidence from Southeast Europe, we advance the understanding of conspiracy theories and politics related to the coronavirus pandemic in three ways: (1) we show that beliefs ... [more ▼]

Using survey and social network evidence from Southeast Europe, we advance the understanding of conspiracy theories and politics related to the coronavirus pandemic in three ways: (1) we show that beliefs in coronavirus conspiracy theories are related to ideological support for a nationalist vision of society and socialist vision of the economy; (2) we also show that both conspiracy believers and nonbelievers are living in bubbles of the like-minded; and (3) we use the tools of natural language processing to elucidate the unambiguous differences in the discourse related to the coronavirus used by conspiracy believers and nonbelievers. [less ▲]

Bias in the eye of beholder? 25 years of election monitoring in Europe

in Democratization (2022), Online

Building on the original corpus of OSCE monitoring reports, the article analyses quarter of century of election monitoring in Europe and assesses the congruence of OSCE written assessments with expert ... [more ▼]

Building on the original corpus of OSCE monitoring reports, the article analyses quarter of century of election monitoring in Europe and assesses the congruence of OSCE written assessments with expert views. We show that, overall, the OSCE monitoring reports are highly correlated and congruent with expert assessments. More importantly, the level of congruence between the two increases with time. However, we also identify various forms of biases rooted in strategic interests and institutional preconditions. Mainly, we show that OSCE has a strong and positive bias towards Russia and its allies when it comes to election assessments indicating defensive and lenient stances. We theorize this mechanism as a pushback effect and show that although Russia’s effort to cripple the activities of OSCE in the past two decades was not successful, OSCE was effectively forced into a defensive position producing less critical assessments than reality warrants. [less ▲]

Talking War: Representation, Veterans and Ideology in Post-War Parliamentary Debates

in Government and Opposition (2022), 57(1), 148-170

How do politicians in post-war societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the ... [more ▼]

How do politicians in post-war societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians’ ideology or their record of combat service? We answer these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and a large corpus of parliamentary debates with an extensive data set of biographical information including detailed records of war service for all members of parliament during two recent terms in Croatia. We demonstrate not only that veteran politicians talk about war differently from their non-veteran counterparts, but also that the sentiment of war-related political discourse is highly dependent on the speaker’s exposure to combat and ideological orientation. These results improve our understanding of the representational role played by combat veterans, as well as of the link between descriptive and substantive representation of vulnerable groups in post-war societies. [less ▲]

Health Versus Wealth During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Saving Lives or Saving the Economy?

in Public Opinion Quarterly (2021), 85(3), 808-835

Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis were characterized by a difficult trade-off: the stringency of the lockdowns decreased the spread of the virus, but amplified the damage to the economy. In this study ... [more ▼]

Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis were characterized by a difficult trade-off: the stringency of the lockdowns decreased the spread of the virus, but amplified the damage to the economy. In this study, we analyze public attitudes toward this trade-off on the basis of a survey and survey-embedded experiment of more than seven thousand respondents from Southeast Europe, collected in April and May 2020. The results show that public opinion generally favored saving lives even at a steep economic cost. However, the willingness to trade lives for the economy was greater when the heterogeneous health and economic consequences of lockdown policies for the young and the elderly were emphasized. Free market views also make people more acceptant of higher casualties, as do fears that the instituted measures will lead to a permanent expansion of government control over society. [less ▲]

Voting and winning: perceptions of electoral integrity in consolidating democracies

in Democratization (2021), 28(8), 1423-1441

How do voters in consolidating democracies see electoral integrity? How does election affect the change in perception of electoral integrity among these voters? What role does winning play in seeing an ... [more ▼]

How do voters in consolidating democracies see electoral integrity? How does election affect the change in perception of electoral integrity among these voters? What role does winning play in seeing an election as free and fair? Building on the theory of the winner-loser gap, we answer these questions using original two-wave panel surveys we conducted before and after three parliamentary elections in Southeast Europe in 2018 and 2020. The article focuses on changes of perception of electoral integrity as a function of satisfaction with the electoral results in contexts where the quality of elections has always been at the centre of political conflict. We specifically explore the socialization effect of elections in environments with notoriously low trust in political institutions and high electoral stakes. The article goes beyond the “sore loser” hypothesis and examines voters’ both political preferences and personal characteristics potentially responsible for the change in perception of electoral integrity over the course of electoral cycle. [less ▲]

Mythologizing War: Legacies of Conflict in Croatian Parliamentary Debates

in Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies (2020), 20(3), 491-513

The paper analyses almost fifteen years of Croatian parliamentary debates and identifies a discourse of war legacies. Using the latest advancements in natural language processing, the paper utilizes ... [more ▼]

The paper analyses almost fifteen years of Croatian parliamentary debates and identifies a discourse of war legacies. Using the latest advancements in natural language processing, the paper utilizes models based on latent semantic analysis and discusses how politicians talk about war in terms of common narratives and shared frameworks. Using a complex vector representation of war-related concepts, the paper specifically focuses on their framing in the context of right-wing authoritarianism. The results show a negative trend of pushing the most frequent war-related concepts to more extreme framing as a potential reflection of their political abuse and ongoing mythologization. [less ▲]

Modelling the Legacies of War Violence: Voters, Parties, Communities

in Anali Hrvatskog politološkog društva: časopis za politologiju (2019), 15(1), 77-101

Wars are extreme events with profound social consequences. Political science, however, has a limited grasp of their impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in their wake ... [more ▼]

Wars are extreme events with profound social consequences. Political science, however, has a limited grasp of their impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in their wake. That is partly the case due to a lack of conceptual clarity when it comes to capturing the effects of war with reliable data. This article systematises and evaluates the attempts at modelling the consequences of war in political science research which relies on quantitative methods. Our discussion is organised around three levels of analysis: individual level of voters, institutional level of political parties, and the aggregate level of communities. We devote particular attention to modelling the legacies of the most recent wars in Southeast Europe, and we offer our view of which efforts have the best potential to help set the foundations of a promising research programme. [less ▲]

Looking Eastward: Network Analysis of Czech Deputies and their Foreign Policy Groups

in Problems of Post-Communism (2019), 66(6), 418-433

The paper analyses a structure of relations among the members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, as reported through their memberships in bi- and multi ... [more ▼]

The paper analyses a structure of relations among the members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, as reported through their memberships in bi- and multi-lateral groups of friendship which establish professional contacts between the Chamber of Deputies and foreign parliaments. We approach the structure as a social network of MPs and interpret the memberships as proxy indicators of their interests/preferences in foreign affairs. The paper shows that inter-parliamentary groups construct a self-sustained independent structure for parliamentary diplomacy which may significantly differ from the official positions of the Government. We find that the studied network has a centralized core-periphery structure, in which deputies who are less prominent and those interested in authoritarian regimes occupy more central positions. The paper connects the findings with the current debates on Central European tendencies to look for allies in large authoritarian regimes (Russia and China), for which we argue the interparliamentary groups might play the role of an important communication channel. [less ▲]

Electoral Violence in the Western Balkans. From Voting to Fighting and Back

Book published by Routledge (2018)

Politické strany v české zahraniční politice

in Kořan, Michal (Ed.) Aktéři a tvorba české zahraniční politiky (2017)