Reference : Voting after war: Legacy of conflict and the economy as determinants of electoral sup...
Scientific journals : Article
Law, criminology & political science : Political science, public administration & international relations
http://hdl.handle.net/10993/30775
Voting after war: Legacy of conflict and the economy as determinants of electoral support in Croatia
English
Glaurdic, Josip[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education (FLSHASE) > Identités, Politiques, Sociétés, Espaces (IPSE) >]
Vukovic, Vuk[University of Oxford > Department of Politics and International Relations]
[en] Post-conflict elections ; Economic voting ; Cleavages ; Nation-building ; East European politics ; Croatia
[en] In spite of a rapidly expanding literature on democratization, elections, and conflict, we lack systematic understanding of what determines electoral results in post-conflict societies. This article offers a novel initiative in revealing electoral patterns in states recuperating from painful experiences of war by analyzing data from more than 500 Croatian municipalities during five post-war electoral cycles. While the findings suggest voters do respond to parties' economic policies, the underlying pattern of electoral support demonstrates that competition is heavily constrained by the legacy of conflict, with the communities more exposed to the violence being more likely to vote for the principal party of the center-right which led the country into independence and throughout the war. This tendency exhibits a remarkable level of stability over time, which suggests conflict dynamics can become firmly embedded in post-conflict democratic electoral competition e even in societies that are not ethnically diverse.
[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education (FLSHASE) > Identités, Politiques, Sociétés, Espaces (IPSE) >]
