CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Kukovec, David |
|---|---|
| Title | Changing the electoral system in Croatia |
| Summary | The Electoral system is one of the most important institutional choices for a country. As such, it is often an object of manipulation for political parties. Croatia is examined as a case on which this thesis shows how a party changed the electoral law for only one purpose – to consolidate its governance in the country. Croatia can be considered as a unique case since it changed its electoral system for four times in only ten years. Moreover, it implemented all of the major electoral system types in the period from 1990 until 2000. In the present thesis, only two electoral cycles are examined – 1992 and 1995 elections. I model electoral system change as a consequence of partisan self-interest. The explanatory model consists of five elements – firstly, instability and organizational under-development of parties show that parties did not have strategies for creating consistent policies which led them to create different strategies for the elections; secondly, opinion polls allowed parties to create the most beneficial proposal for changing the electoral law; thirdly, as a party behaved strategically it started using methods of political engineering; lastly, results of every election were calculated within the potential framework of electoral system which was proposed by the opposition. The hypothesis that the Croatian Democratic Union was an office-seeking party that used a seat-maximization is confirmed with the model. |
| Supervisor | Pelinka, Anton |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/kukovec_david.pdf |
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