The Development of Stable Party Support: Electoral Dynamics in Post-Communist Europe

What conditions help stable patterns of party support to emerge? Using pooled time‐series cross‐section data on election results from 15 East European democracies, the empirical analysis finds that (1) right after a regime change electoral volatility increases while the trend is reversed after democracy has endured for about a decade; (2) ethnic cleavages have no effect on stability while social cleavages affect electoral stability only during economic downturns; (3) both institutions and economic performance influence the stability of party support; however, the effect of the latter diminishes over time when democracies mature.