Mapping the 2020 Slovak Parliamentary Election. Analysis of Spatial Support and Voter Transition

This contribution is a complex analysis of the geographic voting patterns in the 2020 Slovak parliamentary election using methods such as Geographically Weighted Regression, Hierarchical Regression Models, and Ecological Inference. It is focused on the winner of the 2020 parliamentary election, the populist OĽaNO, and on the loser, the traditional left-wing SMER-SD – within the context of electoral support and voter transition in comparison to the 2016 parliamentary election, and in part to the 2019 presidential election. The article contributes to the underdeveloped discourse relating to the spatial support of political parties in Slovakia and finds how the selected socio-economic indicators explain the varying voting patterns. The main finding is that Slovakia is an internally heterogeneous country. The socio-demographic factors have a differentiated (either positive or negative) effect on the electoral support for Slovakian parties. As a result, voting patterns differ not only between the western and eastern parts of the country but also between districts within a common geographic area or region. This reveals the complex set of dividing lines in the country and indicates future trends in Slovakian politics.

Government Partisanship and Electoral Accountability: The Effect of Perceived Employment Situation on Partisan Vote Switching

What are the electoral impacts of perceptions of unemployment under different partisan persuasions of the government? Neither the literature on retrospective economic voting nor partisan voting has provided a compelling answer to this question. This paper addresses this puzzle by analyzing panel surveys and leveraging differences in government partisanship in two consecutive elections. I argue that negative evaluations of the employment situation induce voter transition to support a left-wing party under a right-wing government, but that such voter perceptions do not affect vote choice under a left-wing government. An analysis of a voter transition, using British Election Panel Study 1992–1997 and 1997–2001, reveals findings that support my argument. My argument suggests conditional partisan voting effects. Essentially, the effect of economic issues on vote choice is conditional on issue salience and which party “owns” the issue, namely, the varying levels of issue salience related to government partisanship.

Combining Aggregate Data and Exit Polls for the Estimation of Voter Transitions

Our objective is the estimation of voter transitions between two consecutive parliamentary elections. Usually, such analyses have been based either on individual survey data or on aggregated data. To move beyond these methods and their respective problems, we propose the application of so-called hybrid models, which combine aggregate and individual data. We use a Bayesian approach and extend a multinomial-Dirichlet model proposed in the ecological inference literature. Our new hybrid model has been implemented in the R-package eiwild (= Ecological Inference with individual-level data). Based on extensive simulations, we are able to show that our new estimator exhibits a very good estimation performance in many realistic scenarios. Application case is the voter transition between the Bavarian Regional election and the German federal elections 2013 in the Metropolitan City of Munich. Our approach is also applicable to other areas of electoral research, market research, and epidemiology.

Party Realignment and Voter Transition in Italy, 1987-1996

Between 1987 and 1996, the Italian party system experienced a major realignment. The political alternatives that dominated the postwar period dissolved, and new party and voter alignments emerged. This analysis employs a recently compiled data archive and a new ecological inference technique to examine voter transitions during the period. The disintegration of the ruling party coalition and the appearance of new party alternatives from the center of the analysis. The research highlights the importance of nonvoters, a relatively recent phenomenon in Italian elections, as a precursor of pending party change as well as holding the key to a resolution of the current flux. The new ecological analysis technique generates more robust results than previous techniques and also avoids the pitfalls of survey research.