Measuring Elusive Concepts in Post-Communist Environment: Parties and Voters in Mandate Democracy

Abstract

Despite the long history of the study of mandate democracy, relatively little is known about its application to newer post-communist democracies. Especially lacking are studies incorporating the role of voters in the mandate attribution process. In this case, we describe our research applying voter understanding of party positions to mandate theory. We focus on the challenges we experienced in collecting data and constructing measures that we used to test the theoretical propositions in our study. In particular, we highlight an original measure of Voter Understanding (of party positions) that we developed for this project but which can be applied in other relevant research too. We also discuss decisions we made with respect to our dependent variables and the method of analysis. We conclude with a call for more original data collection in the region.

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