Nostalgic Voting? Explaining the Electoral Support for the Political Left in Post-Soviet Moldova

Ion Marandici

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Does economic voting hold in new democracies? How does political nostalgia influence voting? Although nostalgic voters have been often mentioned as central to the rise of populism in the West, scholars have rarely shown empirically how nostalgia influences electoral choice. In this paper, I use survey data from 2009 and 2016 to investigate the extent and electoral impact of Soviet nostalgia in the context of democratizing Moldova. First, the paper reveals and explains why political nostalgia is distributed unevenly across Moldova’s territory with certain regions and ethnocultural groups embracing romanticized views of the Communist past more often than others. Second, the paper demonstrates that nostalgic orientations toward the past and cultural factors rather than perceptions of economic conditions structure party choice in post-Soviet Moldova. The paper also identifies the discursive similarities between varieties of Western populism, Euroscepticism, illiberal worldviews, and the nostalgic appeals of the Moldovan Left.

Keywords: nostalgia; economic voting; Moldova; Communism; populism; Euroscepticism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A19 P2 R29 Y80 Z13 Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-04-21
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Eurasian Geography and Economics 63.4(2022): pp. 514-542

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/117433/1/Nostalgic%20Voting%20Moldova.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:117433

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).