Mobilizace proti levici? Stranické konsekvence volební účasti v kontextu postkomunismu
Mobilization Against the Left? Party Consequences of Voter Turnout in the Post-Communist Context

Summary/Abstract: Does higher turnout supress left-wing parties, as many previous studies assume? And does communist legacy somehow project on the mentioned relationship? The theoretical discussion is still relatively unclear. This study proposes three different explanatory mechanisms of examining aggregate-level relationship between turnout and electoral support for political parties in the post-communist milieu. The mainstream hypothesis, based on the assumptions of a successful re-stratification of the society and the relevance of class voting, states that higher turnout benefits the left. The second option is derived from the Michigan model of party identification. In this case, political parties with less loyal electorate should profit from higher rates of electoral participation. However, this article makes a case for a third possible explanation, which turns the conventional hypothesis upside down and can be termed simply as „mobilization against the left“. The idea is that the more people come to the polls, the stronger the post-communist right wing parties will be. Moreover, I include in my analysis only two electoral districts (regions) that can be said to be the farthest away from each other in their socioeconomic and political characteristics. Such an approach makes it possible to answer the question whether the expected effect is uniform or unequal across electoral districts in one country. Based on the analysis of election results in 1444 constituencies of two electoral districts in the Central Bohemian and Moravian-Silesian regions in the 2010 Parliamentary elections, I conclude that the proposed approach to the issue of party support and voter turnout has strong empirical support.

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