Brokerage of Electoral Currency and the Effects of Clientelist Linkage in CEE Transitional Political Processes

Social transformation is time-lengthy, with numerous variables contingent on complex arrays of economic, social cultural and political factors. Observing social transformation is just as lethargic as the process itself. Transformation employs liquidity (the sum of contingency factors is not a constant) and is hard to measure, quantify and compare across countries in the absence of generous yearly panel data that could capture its slow crawl. Observing the next best thing is what the aim of the paper i.e. exploring party-elector dynamics as proxy for societal transformations in five CEE countries. Therefore we explore i) the blueprints of social transformations incorporated in the changes in the popular support of political parties during transition parliamentary elections in Romania and V4 countries, as well as the ii) the consequences of the low economic welfare on the construction of party-elector linkages during the electoral milieu of the former communist bloc transition. The main questions that the paper aims to clarify is what linkage type (economic, programmatic or clientelistic) influenced the orientation of voters during the unstable period of transition and to what extent the nature of the linkages established during the first tests of democracy have now an impact on the fragile electoral nexus between electors and elected in Central and Eastern Europe. The present paper contributes to the literature on transition voting behavior and patterns of support for political parties in post-transition perspective. The analysis extricates five electoral cycles in five countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) and covers 158 parties and coalition bodies. At level of generality, our data shows that similar functional relationship hold steady across the five countries and the cross-section analysis coincides with patterns of voting behavior directly linked with welfare (instead of economic voting), programmatic and to some extent to clientelistic linkages.