CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Szekely, Istvan Gergo |
|---|---|
| Title | Ethnic Voting as Issue Voting? Non-participation and Crossover Voting among Ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia |
| Summary | The paper explores the electoral behavior of ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, focusing especially on the factors which may contribute to not supporting the major ethnic parties claiming to represent the community. The main argument is that voting for the major ethnic parties does not follow automatically from the ethnicity of the voters, but electoral decisions depend on the salience attributed to ethnic issues and evaluations about the competence/performance of ethnic and majority parties. A model is proposed about the possible impact of ethnic issue salience and the evaluations of ethnic and majority parties on non-participation, crossover voting and voting for fringe ethnic parties. Beside testing this model, another goal is to offer a more comprehensive explanation by identifying the other variables which may influence electoral behavior. Survey data from both countries is analyzed with logistic regressions and QCA, to assess the factors behind the failure of supporting the ethnic parties. The results show that the outcome produced most consistently by the combination of high ethnic issue salience and negative evaluations of the main ethnic party is voting for fringe ethnic parties. However, in the absence of such parties both crossover and non-participation may occur. Overall, the findings also prove that ethnic voting can be conceptualized as issue voting, but the issue public is not the ethnic group at large, but rather a thin stratum of radicals. |
| Supervisor | Schneider, Carsten Q. |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/szekely_istvan-gergo.pdf |
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