Conclusion: towards an explanation of the territoriality of the vote in Eastern Europe

This chapter explores in how far the same explanatory model can account for territorial heterogeneity in the vote across eastern and western europe. 2349 elections held since 1990 in 562 regions in 10 eastern and 13 western european countries are pooled into one dataset. The explanatory power of territorial cleavages, regional authority, and electoral rules on congruence between regional and national elections and second-order effects in regional elections are systematically explored by employing hierarchical regression models. The findings indicate that there is no need for a separate model for the east but a discussion of the insights provided by the country chapters leads to the identification of variables that seem to specifically impact the regional vote in eastern european regions. The chapter ends with a discussion on the implications of the research findings.keywordsvote shareparty systemnational electionopposition partinational parliamentthese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.