Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and
the Czech Republic, 1990–1999, Joshua A. Tucker, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. xxii, 417.Recognizing and predicting the patterns of voting behaviour is a
formidable task even in the case of mature and stable democracies.
Needless to say, the identification of such trends in the wake of a
fundamental political and economic restructuring, when the basic rules of
the game are still in flux, can be frustratingly elusive. In this
ambitious and methodologically sophisticated study, Joshua Tucker takes on
the challenge and suggests a fresh approach for cutting through the fog of
post-communist institutional ambiguity. The book reports on several
prominent regularities in the voting outcomes that span five countries,
several distinct institutional designs, twenty national elections and ten
years of transition. In contrast to the studies that rely on micro-level
survey data or small-n cross-country comparisons, Tucker aggregates and
analyzes the election results at the intermediate, regional level.
Cross-regional comparison provides enough resolution for detecting
systematic voting patterns shaped by local economic conditions. Explaining
the observed connection between regional economy and regional vote is the
central theme of Tucker's study.
Raymond Μ. Duch & Randolph T. Stevenson, The economic vote: How political and economic institutions condition election results