According to economic voting theory, turbulent elections should go hand in hand with economic hardships. Since retrospective voting presupposes that voters hold the government accountable for the economy, incumbent parties should lose more if they govern during an economic crisis. Electoral change could manifest itself trough massive fleeing of votes from incumbents to the opposition; hard times could even pave the way for political outsiders and lead to party system collapse. However, recent research reveals only moderate increase in the decline of the vote share of incumbents during the 2008-2011 economic crisis (LeDuc and Pammett 2013). Moreover, despite the previously noted hyper-accountability (Roberts 2008) of electorates in Central and Eastern Europe, during the crisis period there were stabilizing elections (such as in 2012 in Lithuania) or even genuine government re-election (as in 2011 in Estonia). If we also add the conclusion by Powell and Tucker (2014) that none of the traditional explanations substantially explains the level of electoral volatility in post-communist states, it becomes apparent that we need either better theory, better research or both in order to explain the turbulence of elections in the region.
Some valuable insights could be drawn from the recent developments of retrospective voting theory. Achen and Bartels (2016) point to the short-sightedness of voters who vote on the basis of their income only several months before the election. This implies that the government should be able to capitalize on short time trends.Hanley and Sikk (2016) offer another explanation in their analysis of anti-establishment parties in Central and Eastern Europe: it is not economy alone, but the combination of economy and corruption that is important in explaining electoral outcomes. We test both of these explanations of election results, employing cross-sectional time-series statistical analysis of elections in the democratic post-communist states since their democratization. Our main dependent variable is the change in the vote share of governing parties, but we also explore how these explanations (short-sighted voting according to income several months before the election and the combination of perceived corruption with the economy) explain electoral volatility in the region. Mixed results hint at a possibility of a previously underexplored option: electoral processes in new post-communist democracies are largely driven by idiosyncratic or even random forces. This could have important implications for the functioning of democratic regimes. If there are no stable social and political identities and retrospective voting (even short sighted) does not work, then electoral democracies in the post-communist states are devoid both of meaningful representation and accountability.
