Lithuanian Parliamentary Elections Research Articles

Expressing Impoliteness in Political TV Debates

This article examines impoliteness in political TV debates in Lithuania. Study adopts qualitative and quantitative content analysis method to analyze 720 minutes of political debates broadcasted before the 2016 Lithuanian Parliamentary elections. Current paper presents theoretical approach to impoliteness, which is later used in empirical analysis to address 2 main objectives: a) to study impoliteness in terms of directness/indirectness and b) to reveal how face threatening acts (FTAs) are expressed. The results of the study have revealed that impoliteness during political TV debates is almost equally expressed directly and indirectly. Direct impoliteness during political debates can be expressed using all functional types of the sentences. Indirect impoliteness in debates can be modified internally and externally using various language resources: inclusive we form, official addressing words, irony, parantheses. This suggests that impoliteness in the context of political TV debates is a unique phenomenon specified by various creative ways of using the language in order to publicly belittle political opponents.

Political TV debates: how to get more power and damage the opponent’s face?

The paper aims to reveal the process of face and power construction in the context of political TV debates in Lithuania and to analyse face threatening acts (FTAs) in terms of propositional content and orientation to the addressee’s face. This study adopts the qualitative content analysis approach to analyse 360 minutes of political debates broadcasted before the 2016 Lithuanian parliamentary elections. The current paper presents the concept of impoliteness, which is later applied in the empirical analysis to address two main objectives: (a) to analyse the process of face and power construction in political TV debates and (b) to study FTAs in terms of propositional content and orientation to the addressee’s face. The results of the study have revealed that politicians seek to get more power by producing FTAs towards their opponents; a zero-sum game metaphor can be used to describe this process. Also, the analysis of FTAs has demonstrated that politicians tend to apply both negative and positive impoliteness strategies. The analysis of FTAs in terms of propositional content has shown that politicians are mostly described as the ones who are lying, hiding the truth, and have performed wrong and ineffective actions in the past. This suggests that participants in Lithuanian political TV debates seek to damage their rival’s face in a way which does not harm their own face by applying indirect – positive and negative – impoliteness strategies and by negatively describing their opponents’ professionalism and general competencies.

Effects of the Mixed Parallel Electoral System in Lithuania: The Worst of All Worlds?

AbstractThis article analyses the political effects of the mixed parallel electoral system in Lithuania. According to the ‘best of both worlds’ logic, mixed systems could combine advantages from both the majoritarian and proportional formulas. However, counterarguments were also presented in the literature, pointing to the possibility of the ‘worst of both worlds’. According to presented analysis of Lithuanian parliamentary elections between 1992 and 2016, the pessimistic scenario is expected when a mixed parallel electoral system is used in a new democracy with a weakly institutionalised party system and high volatility. Lithuania’s mixed parallel system produces relatively disproportional election results. However, it also facilitates the fragmentation of party system. Moreover, the effects in a concrete election are hardly predictable, especially the seat bonus of election winner. Evidence in the article points to a conclusion that mixed parallel electoral systems could contribute to the ‘worst of all worlds’ and new democracies should avoid them.

Analyzing Electoral Behavior Using PTV’s: Benefits and Methodological Issues

Abstract In the last decade, the propensity-to-vote (PTV) measure is being increasingly used in the research of electoral behavior. The purpose of this article is to explore the advantages and methodological issues of this measure, applying it for the analysis of the determinants of party choice in the 2016 Lithuanian parliamentary elections. In particular, the article explores the implications of using OLS regression for analysing a generic party with a stacked data matrix instead of cross-classified multilevel modeling.

Modeling of the Parties' Vote Share Distributions

Competition between varying ideas, people and institutions fuels the dynamics of socio-economic systems. Numerous analyses of the empirical data extracted from different financial markets have established a consistent set of stylized facts describing statistical signatures of the competition in the financial markets. Having an established and consistent set of stylized facts helps to set clear goals for theoretical models to achieve. Despite similar abundance of empirical analyses in sociophysics, there is no consistent set of stylized facts describing the opinion dynamics. In this contribution we consider the parties' vote share distributions observed during the Lithuanian parliamentary elections. We show that most of the time empirical vote share distributions could be well fitted by numerous different distributions. While discussing this peculiarity we provide arguments, including a simple agent-based model, on why the beta distribution could be the best choice to fit the parties' vote share distributions.

PADALYTAS BALSAVIMAS 1996–2016 METŲ SEIMO RINKIMUOSE: MASTAS IR POBŪDIS

This article explores the phenomenon of split-ticket voting in the Lithuanian par­liamentary elections. The mixed parallel electoral system, introduced into the Sei­mas elections with the adoption of the Constitution, is a rather favorable institutional structure for split-ticket voting behavior, as citizens are able to vote for a list of can­didates of one party in the proportional constituency and for a candidate of another party in the majoritarian single-member constituency. For the analysis of the exten and patterns of split-ticket voting, we have used data from post-election surveys in 2012 and 2016 as well as the aggregate (on the constituency level) data from election results in 1996–2012. An analysis of the aggregate data was performed by employing Søren R. Thomsen’s (1987) estimator for the ecological inference, which allows to estimate the values of internal cells in the R × C tables when only marginal distribu­tions are available. The results of the analysis revealed several important insights about electoral behavior and party competition in Lithuania. The mixed parallel electoral system is not only a theoretically, but also a practically favorable institutional setting for split-ticket voting in Lithuania. An analysis of both the post-election survey data (al­though to a lesser extent) and the aggregate electoral results showed that the extent of split-ticket-voting in Lithuanian parliamentary elections is rather high. In such cases, sympathizers of the major parties or their candidates choose rather freely from the “menu” offered in single- and multi-member constituencies. Therefore, in this respect, Lithuania is a rather typical Central and Eastern European country, where electoral behavior is rather unconstrained and volatile. An analysis of the aggregate data showed (however, this result was not fully cor­roborated by the analysis of the post-election survey data) that although split-ticket voting is substantial, its patterns are quite predictably structured by the dimensions of the party competition, which emerged around 2004. Voters split their votes along the lines of certain party blocks. One of these blocks usually contains conservatives and liberals, the other being made up of social democrats, laborites (also the former New Union) and the Order and Justice Party. The latter block might also include the Lithu­anian Farmers and Greens Union, even though in the last parliamentary elections, this party attracted a substantial number of votes from sympathizers of different other parties in cases of split-ticket voting. Moreover, an analysis of the aggregate data revealed another interesting pattern of split-ticket voting in Lithuania. In the parliamentary elections of 2008, 2012 and 2016, the newly emerging relevant parties (the National Resurrection Party, The Way of Courage and the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union) collected a substantial part of their votes (in cases of split-ticket voting) from the oldest and longest-estab­lished parties in Lithuania: The Homeland Union – Lithuanian Christian Democrats and the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party. This pattern of electoral behavior might be explained by the protest voting on the side of the supporters of these two parties. Thus, an analysis of split-ticket voting patterns revealed quite an interesting phenom­enon – split-ticket voting as a variation of protest voting – which could become an object of further investigations.

Empirical Analysis and Agent-Based Modeling of the Lithuanian Parliamentary Elections

We analyze a parties’ vote share distribution across the polling stations during the Lithuanian parliamentary elections of 1992, 2008, and 2012. We find that the distribution is rather well fitted by the Beta distribution. To reproduce this empirical observation, we propose a simple multistate agent-based model of the voting behavior. In the proposed model, agents change the party they vote for either idiosyncratically or due to a linear recruitment mechanism. We use the model to reproduce the vote share distribution observed during the election of 1992. We discuss model extensions needed to reproduce the vote share distribution observed during the other elections.

The Rise In Popularity Of The Lithuanian Political Party Drasos Kelias

ABSTRACT This article examines the genesis of a new Lithuanian political unit, the Drasos kelias party, which was created in 2012 and successfully participated in the 2012 Lithuanian parliamentary elections, reconstructing it in three stages based on the analysis of news portals. Reconstruction of the first stage is based on the competing “conspiracy versions” (two different interpretations of the unsolved criminal story in the news media) in 2009- 2010. Two archetypal characters (criminal and/or hero) were sought in the interpretation of the two aforementioned versions. Agenda setting and media framing theories were used as explanatory theories. The second stage (2011-2012) is reconstructed through further analysis of the news portals as well as through the analysis of some additional research from the interviews and focus group discussions. This data allowed us to retrace the logic of collective thinking. This logic of collective thinking contributed to the formation of a continuous “single issue” protest community which was united by the slogan “do not hand the child to a paedophilia clan”. This group of people constantly hindered the governmental institutions from the implementation of the court decision to hand the child to her mother, and over a long period of time its protest arguments expanded from “not handing the child to her mother” to protests against the entire Lithuanian legal system. Further, the third stage associated with formal institutionalization of political party and its rising of popularity among the voters in the 2012 Lithuanian parliamentary elections is analyzed. The analysis stresses the importance of social and personal networks for the regional dispersion of party election results.

Voting Advice Applications in Lithuania: Promoting Programmatic Competition or Breeding Populism?

AbstractThis article analyses the effects of the voting assistance tool Manobalsas that was developed for the Lithuanian parliamentary elections of 2008 by three leading universities in Lithuania. Analytical voting assistance tools (or Voting Advice Applications — VAAs) assist voters by offering systematised information about candidates and parties, and by providing voting recommendation based on the congruence of political attitudes between a voter and a party. Voting assistance tools were mainly developed by academic institutions to inform voters about the policy positions of political parties, and to promote programmatic competition between parties. The analysis of the use of the Manobalsas voting advice application in Lithuania suggests that parties might be able to manipulate the results of the tool by adopting non‐ideological (ideologically unconstrained) populist policy positions. The remarkable success of a non‐programmatic party in the Lithuanian Manobalsas system demonstrates that VAAs might be advantageous to non‐ideological populist parties which are most flexible to adjust to the attitudes of an “average” voter.

Explaining the 2000 Lithuanian Parliamentary Elections: An Application of Contextual and New Institutional Approaches

Lithuania’s 2000 parliamentary elections were the first in the post-Soviet era to fail to produce a majority government. Further, neither the Homeland Union nor the Democratic Labor Party entered into the ruling coalition. In this article, Terry D. Clark and Nerijus Prekevičius explore two different ways of explaining why this occurred. To answer the broader question, the first approach focuses on the particular events that occurred in the run-up to the elections. To consider why particular parties fared better or worse than expected, the second approach evaluates a set of rational choice approaches, including spatial analysis. Neither approach is preferable to the other; instead, they are complementary, each helping to resolve certain questions that are appropriate to the particular approach. To conclude, they consider the implications of their findings for the consolidation of Lithuania’s party system.

The Lithuanian parliamentary elections of 1996

The Lithuanian parliamentary elections of 1996