The Transitional Economic Voting Model Revisited: The Case of Poland 1993–1998

Abstract

This article evaluates the extent to which the transitional economic voting model that Tucker (2006) developed to explain voting behavior in young postcommunist democracies of Europe applied to Poland in the 1990s. According to Tucker, voting behavior depends on the transitional identity of the political parties and voters’ status of winners or losers of transition. Using the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN and its data on the 1993 and 1998 parliamentary elections, I distinguish economic winners and losers of the transformation by tracing the socioeconomic situation of the same respondents through time. I find that the political situation in Poland during the first years after the transition was not as unstable and chaotic for voters as Tucker assumed. There is little empirical support for the transitional economic voting model in the first years after transition. Winners did not have a higher propensity to vote for reformist parties, and losers were not more likely to vote for old-regime parties.

Keywords:

• Parliamentary elections
• POLPAN
• postcommunist democracies
• transitional economic voting model

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank K. Maciek Slomczynski for the encouragement to conduct this study and providing access to the documentation of the POLPAN study. Marta Kolczynska and Danuta Zyczynska-Ciolek provided enormous help in understanding the nuances of the POLPAN datasets. Irina Tomescu-Dubrow helped a lot during the final stage of preparation of the manuscript. The author would also like to thank Sandy Marquart-Pyatt and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive advice provided during the reviewing process.

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Notes on contributors

Michal Kotnarowski

Michal Kotnarowski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research expertise includes voting behavior, comparative politics and political methodology.