Preferential Voting and Accountability in an Ethnically divided Country: The Case of Latvia

Preferential voting within a list PR system (PV) offers citizens opportunities for a more nuanced expression of their political preferences. As such, preferential voting is seen as inducive to cultivation of personal reputation of politicians, intra-party competition, and lower cohesion of parties in legislature and in their organizational life. Thus, PV contributes to personalization of politics and bodes well with a broader trend of dealignment. Moreover, PV can serve as an enhanced mechanism of political accountability if voters’ individualized preferences formed on the basis of evaluation of the past performance of candidates affect who gets elected. Although much attention has been devoted to the effects of PV on political parties, party systems, and legislatures, less attention has focussed on studying voters who actually express individualized preferences. This observation applies even more to post-Communist countries where some form of PV has been increasingly utilized by voters. Latvia provides an excellent opportunity to study voter behaviour under PV as this post-Communist, ethnically divided country operates effectively an open list system where each voter can express both positive and negative preferences for each candidate on the list of his/her choice. The 2014 parliamentary elections saw a further increase in the utilization of PV that significantly affected the election results. Using data from official electoral returns and a 2014 post-election survey, the author will explore what structural and attitudinal factors distinguished PV-users from non-users. Did incumbent parties see more PVs? Were there any sociological patterns of the use of PV? Were party identifiers and/or loyal supporters less likely to utilize PV? How did (dis)satisfaction with government performance and the functioning of democracy influence the utilization of PV? What was the role of party leaders in casting a positive preference? How did various kinds of contacts with parties/candidates affect the use of PV?