Parties, Pluralism, and Electoral Politics in Post-Communist Settings

Session Submission Type: In-Person Created Panel

Session Description

Pluralism is both a political resource and impediment for political parties. Across the post-communist world, the ethnicity of political candidates that a party fields may either boost or impede voter support. In Russia, for example, experimental research in multi-ethnic regions reveals that co-ethnicity is particularly salient: voters provide a higher evaluation for candidates of their own ethnicity, regardless of whether they belonged to the same party. However, it also suggests that party identity may trump ethnic affiliation at the ballot box, suggesting that ethnic and party identities in pluralistic societies may not always align. Increasing issue diversity - the breadth of issues on a party’s agenda - is another way in which parties can leverage pluralism to their electoral advantage. Extending existing research on electoral politics in Western Europe, analysis of manifesto data from 20 post-communist countries over a 30 year period reveals that parties in post-communist polities also stand to benefit from embracing issue diversity. For ruling center-left parties in post-communist democracies, exploiting pluralism in citizen attitudes toward liberalizing economic policies is another possible electoral strategy. Cross-national analysis suggests that support for policies liberalizing welfare and labor market institutions, as reflected by cuts in universal entitlement programs, unemployment insurance, and employment security, has more negative electoral effects than other types of market reform. In states like China where political authority is highly concentrated, the ruling party’s choices focus less on electoral strategies and instead center on the tradeoff between electoral manipulation and legitimacy. At the village level, electoral manipulation may paradoxically increase election legitimacy and therefore party support because of popular support for consensus-based political selection. In both communist and post-communist states, pluralism is simultaneously a political resource and obstacle for political parties. Papers in this panel employ pluralistic methodological approaches - ranging from ethnographic research to lab-in-the-field experimental work to statistical analyses - and cover more than 20 countries in the communist and post-communist world.

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• Does Ethnicity Trump the Party? Experimental Evidence from Russia - Olga A. Avdeyeva

• Social-Democratic Liberalization and Electoral Outcomes in Post-Communist Europe - Binio S. Binev, Virginia Tech

• Legitimacy from Electoral Manipulation: The Mass Culture of Consensus Elections in Chinese Village Elections (Pre-Recorded) - Jingping LIU, Pennsylvania State University

• Deliberation in the Russian Duma: Legislative Speeches in a Hybrid-Regime - Nicholas James, Oxford University

Chair

• Allison D. Evans University of Nevada, Reno

Discussants

• Allison D. Evans University of Nevada, Reno

• Olga A. Avdeyeva