Learning When to Run and How to Vote: Strategic Electoral Behavior in Post-Communist Countries

How rapidly do parties and voters learn to behave strategically after a democratic transition? What factors affect the speed at which this process occurs? Existing studies (Tavits and Annus, 2006; Queralt, 2009) find strong evidence that electoral coordination is increasing in democratic experience, converging toward the long-term equilibrium relationship between party system size at the electoral and legislative levels posited by Duverger’s Law (Duverger, 1954; Cox, 1997). This paper builds up on this literature and introduces three original contributions. First, I challenge the finding that only voters are learning by providing evidence of this same process taking place also at the elite level. Second, I disentangle what type of information increases with democratic experience, showing that political actors are learning about both the consequences of electoral systems and the viability of political parties. Finally, I provide a more direct test of the theory by using district-level data, since it is within constituencies that electoral decisions take place.