Values and Voting in Central Europe

VODA, Petr. Values and Voting in Central Europe. In 7th ECPR General Conference. 2013.

Basic information

• Original name: Values and Voting in Central Europe
• Name in Czech: Hodnoty a volebni chovani ve styredni Evrope
• Name (in English): Values and Voting in Central Europe
• Authors: VODA, Petr.
• Edition: 7th ECPR General Conference, 2013.

Other information

• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• WWW: URL
• Keywords in English: values, voting, left, right, libertarianism, authoritarianism, religious, secular, postmaterialism

Abstract

The proposed paper deals with the different role of values in electorates in Western and Eastern European countries. Several studies (Evans and Whitefield, Kitschlet) from the early 1990s suggest different electoral behavior in longstanding and new post-communist democracies. Although voting behavior in Europe has been widely investigated, there is still insufficient understanding of the differences between Western and Eastern European countries since the majority of articles is concerned with either only longstanding democracies or post-communist countries. The aim of this paper is to describe the relation between political values and the choice of a party (based on the data from the European Values Study) and explain the differences among the European Countries. The selected countries include Austria and the west part of Germany as representatives of the Western European countries, and the east part of Germany and the Visegrad group countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) as representatives of the Eastern European countries. This selection enables finding the effects of post-communism and simultaneously leads to control for the role of different types of communist regimes on the emergence and characteristics of values in the Eastern bloc. The analysis deals with the effects of both old (or “core”) and new political values. The emphasis is put on the crucial values - libertarian/authoritarian and socialist/laissez-faire values and on post-materialism. Multinomial logistic regression is employed to achieve this aim.