Seventeenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Pre-election coalition building should demonstrate an increasing stability for a political system as a sign of consolidation of political systems in transitioning countries. Yet there is a conundrum because post-communist Europe challenges these hypotheses. By analyzing parties that survive at least two election cycles, I isolate political elements of a consolidating democratic system and investigate the volatility presence among the parties. The logic of this argument is that voter volatility decreases for pre-electoral coalitions as a multiparty system emerges that represents a broader ideological spectrum. However, political parties that form coalitions are losing support during the creation of this stable political system. Thus, coalition building does not result in majority winning parties, but functions to condense parties who continually represent lower proportions of the voting population. With a statistical investigation of panel data for elections across nine countries over fourteen years, I demonstrate the conditions of a multiparty system on voter volatility. Through case study analysis, data demonstrates how these processes erode support for those stable political parties that formed coalitions as attempts to win further support among a population.