CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Stankov, Nemanja |
|---|---|
| Title | Democracy under threat: Understanding mass appeal for undemocratic parties and practices |
| Summary | In this dissertation, I explore the link between voter characteristics, religiosity, and right-wing authoritarianism, and particular types of electoral behaviour. Within a paper-based structure, the introductory chapter situates four empirical chapters in the framework of the democratic backsliding theory and its two dimensions - executive aggrandizement and strategic manipulation of elections. The first two empirical chapters focus on electoral support for populist far-right parties, which are recognized as the primary contributor to executive aggrandizement. The following two chapters focus on clientelist vote buying, a practice that severely skews the functioning of electoral institutions. Specifically, in chapter II, we look at the radical right-wing parties’ (RRWP) potential to mobilize religious voters. As the literature reports mixed results, we propose that religiosity increases the chance of voting for RRWPs when ethnic relations are a salient issue in the political system. By utilizing several European Social Survey and European Values Study datasets in a multilevel modelling approach, we find that religiosity is a significant predictor of the RRWP vote when there are salient ethnic relations in the political system proxied by the presence of an ethnic minority party. In chapter III, I depart from a claim that the research on the origins of populist party support suffers from its broad conceptualisation of the populist radical right party family (PRR). I examine the link between authoritarianism and party support/appeal based on the ideological distinction between the three subfamilies within the far right: (a) the far right, (b) the populist right, and (c) the populist far right. Based on the analysis of Slovakia (2017), Austria (2013), and Serbia (2008-2012), the results show that individual levels of authoritarianism were associated with party support or the appeal of the far right and the populist far right, rather than parties of the populist right. In chapter IV, I focus on the decision of patrons/brokers on whom to target for clientelist exchange. Building on the theories of norm-based compliance, I argued that authoritarian individuals should be more frequently targeted, as they should be more likely to comply with brokers’ demands without any external monitoring. In a multilevel approach on Afrobarometer 5 dataset for 34 countries, I show that authoritarians have a higher chance of being targeted than non-authoritarian individuals by an average marginal effect of 3% and that this association increases as the district magnitude rises. In chapter V, I revisit the question of why candidates/parties are able to secure re-election after corruption scandals occur. Moving away from the dominant explanation in the literature, I focus on the role of attitudinal characteristics in shaping perceptions of vote-buying allegations. With two studies from Montenegro, I experimentally show that authoritarian submission is related to higher support rates for candidates who allegedly use vote buying (Study I), followed by an observational study that links authoritarian submission with the perception of vote buying as a good rather than a bad practice, conditioned on the perception of election importance (Study II). |
| Supervisor | Littvay, Levente |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/stankov_nemanja.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University