Post-socialist democratization: a comparative political economy model of the vote for Hungary and Nicaragua

For advanced democracies, models of electoral behavior are rather well developed. However, such models may explain only a part of electoral behavior in new democracies. In particular, they seem poorly suited to the emerging, post-socialist democracies, where the vote choice involves fundamental national economic and political variables. While the new democracies of Hungary and Nicaragua are different in certain obvious ways, they share the common experience of profound economic and political system shifts. In this exploratory research, we argue that, in such cases, voters decide largely on the basis of key political and economic system considerations. To support our claim, we formulate a comparative Political Economy model and estimate it by using logistic regression on survey data from the 1990 Nicaraguan election and the 1994 Hungarian election. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.