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Political Volatility and Governance in East Central Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Carolyn Forestiere
Carolyn Forestiere*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
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Abstract

In this article, Carolyn Forestiere investigates political volatility as a way to explain varying levels of governance across the new democracies of east central Europe. Specifically, legislative and executive volatility are examined. The results suggest that differences in legislative volatility help explain variations in governance, especially during the beginning of a new democracy. Once party systems begin to consolidate, however, differences in executive volatility begin to matter more. A case study of Poland confirms some of Forestiere's conclusions. While the legislative party system has shown some signs of stabilization, executive volatility remains a salient political problem, which over time has led to a steady decline in the quality of governance.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , Winter 2010 , pp. 903 - 924
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

I would like to thank Christopher S. Allen, Dave Marcotte, Shawn Williams, and the anonymous reviewers for their assistance and comments. Any and all errors are my own.

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24. Because there may be serial correlation within the observations for each country, the standard errors reported in table 2 may be incorrect. One strategy to address this problem is to calculate standard errors “clustered” on countries. When I re-estimate the model reported in table 3, clustering the standard error, the point estimates are unchanged but are less precisely estimated. The coefficient on GNI remains significant, but party replacement is no longer significant at conventional levels (t = —1.34). This result, however, is to be expected: with only four observations for each of the eight countries, there are very few degrees of freedom, making it very unlikely to reject null hypotheses. Since the coefficient for the party replacement variable remained unchanged, the inclusion of additional years’ data would result in more precisely estimated coefficients, likely significant at conventional levels.

25. Greater levels of income are predicted to be associated with higher scores on the governance index because the governments in wealthier countries have significant advantages over governments in poorer countries. Measures for GNI are taken from the Europa World Book for selected years. Furthermore, lower levels of ethnic fractionalization, which assesses the probability that two randomly selected individuals will belong to different groups, are also predicted to be associated with higher scores on the governance index. Governments that have to administer services and respond to largely heterogeneous societies may have greater problems in keeping the peace and providing a high quality of governance to all politically equal citizens. Measures for ethnic fractionalization are taken from Nauro F. Campos and Vitaliy S. Kuzeyev, “On the Dynamics of Ethnic Fractionalization“ (paper prepared for the Institute for the Study of Labor Discussion Paper Series, IZA DP No. 2822, 2007).

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39. The unfortunate death of President Lech Kaczyriski and several other Polish elite in the Smolensk plane crash on 10 April 2010 may, however, serve as an exogenous event promoting national unity. Furthermore, the new president elected on 4 July 2010, Bronislaw Komorowski, belongs to the same party (Civic Platform) as the current prime minister, which may also facilitate greater executive stability.