The Transitional Economic Voting Model Revisited: The Case of Poland 1993–1998

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This article evaluates the extent to which the transitional economic voting model that Tucker (2006) developed to explain voting behavior in young postcommunist democracies of Europe applied to Poland in the 1990s. According to Tucker, voting behavior depends on the transitional identity of the political parties and voters’ status of winners or losers of transition. Using the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN and its data on the 1993 and 1998 parliamentary elections, I distinguish economic winners and losers of the transformation by tracing the socioeconomic situation of the same respondents through time. I find that the political situation in Poland during the first years after the transition was not as unstable and chaotic for voters as Tucker assumed. There is little empirical support for the transitional economic voting model in the first years after transition. Winners did not have a higher propensity to vote for reformist parties, and losers were not more likely to vote for old-regime parties.