Electoral turnout in post-communist Europe: The legacies of the past

• Autores: Piotr Zagorski
• Directores de la Tesis: José Ramón Montero Gibert (dir. tes.), Andrés Santana-Leitner (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid ( España ) en 2021
• Idioma: inglés
• Títulos paralelos:
  • Participación electoral en Europa poscomunista: Los legados del pasado
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Eva Anduiza Perea (presid.), Irene Martín Cortés (secret.), Jason Wittenberg (voc.), Anna Grzymala Busse (voc.), Radoslaw Markowski (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Derecho, Gobierno y Políticas Públicas por la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
• Materias:
  • Ciencia política
    • Vida política
      • Elecciones
      • Comportamiento político
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: Biblos-e Archivo
• Resumen

  • Electoral turnout rates in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are lower and their recent decline steeper than in the West. Poland is a key outlier in the region, as it did not experience any turnout boost in the first years of democracy and it has exceptionally low turnout levels. Existing accounts focus on the institutional context after 1989 and the individual characteristics as drivers of the lower turnout in CEE and Poland, with limited explanatory power, especially for the latter case. In a nutshell, this thesis aims to shed light on the reasons behind the lower turnout rates in the postcommunist European countries, and in Poland particularly, by taking a historical turn and tracing the impact of the long-lasting legacies of the pre-communist, communist, and transitional past.

    Building on theories of voting as a habit, political socialization, and individual communist legacies with the intensifying and resistance-building effects at both individual and contextual levels, I show that the legacies of the past influence turnout in CEE on top of the more proximate factors associated with the turnout decision. This thesis consists of one co-authored and two singleauthored articles accepted for publication at East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, and Politics. Using CSES data, I offer three key insights: (1) the long-lasting legacies of the nineteenth-century Habsburg rule in the Polish Galicia influence turnout in this region through locally transmitted political and religious values; (2) political socialization under authoritarian communist rule hinders voting, while the effect of the exposure to the totalitarian socialization is dependent on religiosity; (3) political socialization in a context of high party system fragmentation leaves a footprint of non-voting. These findings have several implications for explaining the low Polish turnout puzzle, for the existing theoretical approaches to studying the impact of the legacies of the past, and for the studies of individual and institutional determinants of turnout more broadly