An epidemic of a specific type of economic hardship: debt enforcement actions: The (extensive) failure of the Social democracy in the Czech Republic or even in Eastern Europe? Electoral behaviour of citizens facing debt enforcement

After the accession of most Eastern European countries to the European Union in the early 21st century, the region's peculiarities appeared insignificant and of little consequence. However, Russia's aggression towards Ukraine has brought attention to Eastern Europe and illuminated its distinctiveness, which merits greater scrutiny. This research aims to investigate the influence of a specific feature of economic hardship on electoral behaviour – namely, debt enforcement. Preliminary results reveal that the issue of debt enforcement actions significantly impacts citizens' electoral behaviour. The study focuses on the Czech Republic, the only country in the region with detailed data available on this issue. Recent statistics show that over 670 thousand Czech citizens (more than 8 percent of the adult population) face debt enforcement, despite the Czech Republic consistently reporting one of the lowest unemployment rates in the European Union. However, Czech Social democracy (a party that claims to promote the values of a regulated economy and solidarity) has never thematized this socio-economic issue. Hence, in this paper, I test whether the fact that the Czech Social democracy did not seize a specific type of economic hardship, namely the issue of debt enforcement, is to some extent responsible for its decline from usual gains of over 20 percent to falling out of parliament. This research employs unique data on debt enforcement from all more than 6,200 Czech municipalities. The research analyses the impact of debt enforcement actions on the electoral performance of social democracy and populists. The results show that in municipalities in which more citizens face debt enforcement, the social democrats receive fewer votes. Conversely, the number of citizens facing debt enforcement action in a municipality is positively correlated with voting populists. This is in line with a broader trend across Eastern Europe, where social democracy voters are shifting to populist parties. The issue of debt enforcement, therefore, emerges as an essential new variable in research on electoral behaviour in the Czech Republic. Due to many similarities, this could also be the case for more parts of Eastern Europe. However, data about this issue in other countries in the region are not available.