Party Voters Gone Astray: Explaining Independent Candidate Success in the 2009 European Elections in Estonia

Abstract

While independent candidates rarely perform well in party-centered systems, a genuinely independent candidate attracted a quarter of the nationwide vote in the 2009 European Parliament elections in Estonia. This study uses data from the Estonian case to address the question of why voters vote for independents. It develops and tests two explanations: the first construes mass vote for an independent candidate as a manifestation of anti-party sentiment, while the second argues that voting independent constitutes a variation on the familiar theme of punishing the incumbents in second-order elections. The results lend strong support to the latter explanation, suggesting that voting independent constituted a low-cost strategy for punishing the incumbents in a context where strong socio-political cleavages inhibited vote-switching to the opposition.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Estonian Science Foundation (grant no. 7903) and Estonian Targeted Financing (grant no. 0180128). The authors thank Mark Franklin, Kristjan Vassil, Allan Sikk, Ben Stanley and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on various versions of the manuscript.

Notes

László Tőkés, elected to the EP as an independent candidate in 2007, was backed by Fidesz, the main opposition party in Hungary. Elena Băsescu, daughter of the incumbent president of Romania, had close ties with the Democratic Liberal Party, which she rejoined immediately after the election.

Since 1992, independent candidates have won, on average, 1.3% of the vote in general elections. In the country's first-ever EP elections, held in May 2004, the combined vote share of four independent candidates was 5.7%.

Tarand claims to have borrowed money from his mother to pay the required registration deposit.

The other five independent candidates on the ballot collectively received only 4.3% of the vote. They differed greatly from Tarand – and from one another – in terms of ideology, personal profile and campaign messages.

We acknowledge that the change of electoral rules just prior to the 2009 election may have had a significant effect on the calculations of voters. However, our data does not allow us to test the conjecture that revolt against the new rules (or the old habit of voting for candidates, rather than parties) led people to vote for Tarand, as opposed to one of the parties.

We include SDE voters in the “coalition voter” group as the party left the government on May 21, 2009 – i.e. a few weeks before the EP election. It is reasonable to expect that voters consider the SDE co-responsible for government performance between 2007 and 2009, especially given that a leading SDE politician serving as the Minister of Finance was a chief engineer – and the public face of – the massive budget cuts implemented during the onset of the economic crisis.

The usual tests for multicollinearity were performed; none of the variables in the model are highly correlated with one another.