Structural stability despite increased fragmentation: The 2021 county elections in Croatia

ABSTRACT

The 2021 county elections in Croatia were the perfect example of political change amidst continuity. Relatively new parties and independent candidates made significant inroads against the dominant players of the center-right and the center-left, most notably in the capital city of Zagreb, where a novel leftist political platform won the elections conclusively. The rise of new and credible alternatives resulted in increased fragmentation of the county assemblies and likely more unstable regional governments in the near future. On the other hand, the party that has dominated Croatian politics since independence, Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), continued that dominance on the county-level by winning 15 out of 21 offices of county prefects. More important, the determinants of electoral support for the principal political blocs have remained unchanged from the pattern observed in all national elections since the end of Croatia’s War of Independence more than two and a half decades ago.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional elections
• Croatia
• voter choice

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Alice Grignani for her research assistance and Christophe Lesschaeve for the maps which were created using Glaurdić et al. 2021.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We add the votes of the Istrian Democratic Assembly (Istarski demokratski sabor – IDS) to the SDP votes in the 2021 elections because they ran together in the 2020 national elections. The IDS, however, is a distinctive and arguably unique regionalist player in Croatia that has dominated Istrian politics independently of the SDP that has generally been its national-level partner (Stjepanović 2018).

2 The correlation between the 2020 national and 2021 regional votes is also high for the DP and Most. When added together (since they are ideologically close and they ran together in three counties), the correlation is 0.74.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FP7 Ideas: European Research Council: [Grant Number 714589].