It's the economy, comrade! Economic conditions and election results in postcommunist Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic from 1990 to 1996

Since the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe, issues surrounding simultaneous transitions to democratic political systems and market economies have dominated the concerns of both academics and policy makers. While much effort has been expended on developing rigorous theories to explain how political conditions affect economic outcomes, the same can not be said of the reverse relationship. This manuscript addresses this gap in the literature by developing two models of the effects of economic conditions on election results that are based on the existing literature on economic voting but modified to reflect conditions facing transition countries. The Referendum Model builds off the main strand of the literature and proposes that good economic conditions should help incumbent parties. The Transition Model, however, takes its cue from a secondary strand focusing on partisanship and argues that economic conditions affect a party's electoral fortunes based on the party's core identity. Empirical tests are conducted on an original database containing regional level macro-economic data and election results from fourteen elections between 1990-96 in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Russia. The empirical analysis strongly supports the predictions of the Transition Model.;The second half of the manuscript addresses the question of when economic conditions ought to have more or less of an effect on economic conditions. Five different hypothesis are presented and tested using the same data set. The first is a combined version of the Transition and Referendum models labeled the Unified Hypothesis. The next two hypotheses take their cue from the theoretical notion that economic conditions ought to have more of an impact on election results the more responsible the parties being elected are for economic policy. The final two hypotheses spring from a market based approach: economic conditions ought to matter more when other factors matter less. The findings are most supportive of the unified and market based approaches, and less so of the responsibility based approach.