Petia Kostadinova

Petia Kostadinova
University of Illinois at Chicago | UIC · Department of Political Science

PhD

About

30
Publications
5,661
Reads
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598
Citations
Education
August 1997 - May 2002
Florida State University
Field of study
  • Political Science
August 1993 - May 1997
American University in Bulgaria
Field of study
  • Political Science - International Relations

Publications

Publications (30)
Chapter
This chapter explores a cornerstone of democratic theory: the idea that parties mediate the effect of public opinion on government policies. It begins by discussing whether elections give parties a mandate to pursue their campaign promises, a supposition that many political theorists find problematic. The chapter then reviews theories that predict...
Article
Research on representation within the European Union (EU) often assumes that partisan policy preferences are mediated primarily through the European Parliament, while the European Council and Council of the EU (Council) represent national interests. This assumption obfuscates the potential for divergent policy preferences within Council delegations...
Article
Recent research has documented the European Commission's attention to the preferences of the European public and the other EU institutions when formulating policy proposals. This project demonstrates that such efforts originated with the first Barroso Commission, which addressed public concerns through purposeful coordination with the European Parl...
Chapter
This chapter explores a cornerstone of democratic theory: the idea that parties mediate the effect of public opinion on government policies. It begins by discussing whether elections give parties a mandate to pursue their campaign promises, a supposition that many political theorists find problematic. The chapter then reviews theories that predict...
Article
Free and independent media are among the essential components of any democracy, serving several functions, such as improved political knowledge among the electorate (Soroka et al 2009) and the changes in voting behavior that this entails (Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita 2014), political mobilization (Norris 2000), and policy agenda–setting (Walgrave...
Book
Thirty years after Bulgaria’s democratic breakthrough, this book provides a “balance sheet” of the country’s democratic institutions through a number of interdisciplinary contributions. The volume is organized around three themes—democratic institutions, civil society, and European Union (EU) processes—and examines such topics such as voting, polit...
Article
In this article, we review the political developments in Bulgaria since the fall of communism in 1989, including the process of European integration that it underwent. We pay a particular attention to the positions that political parties in the country take with respect to the country’s membership in the European Union (EU). The place of the EU in...
Article
Utilizing a newly compiled data set, this article demonstrates that some election pledges made by the transnational Europarties are included among the European Commission priorities issued during the pre-legislative stage. The data set consists of 597 promises made by four transnational Europarties during the 2004 and 2009 European Parliament (EP)...
Chapter
Despite the long history of the study of mandate democracy, relatively little is known about its application to newer post-communist democracies. Especially lacking are studies incorporating the role of voters in the mandate attribution process. In this case, we describe our research applying voter understanding of party positions to mandate theory...
Article
Building on the mandate theory of democracy and literature on media coverage of elections, this article theorizes why information regarding party promises that is transmitted through the media could affect the former’s fulfillment. Utilizing a unique data set composed of 2,676 promises issued by 14 legislative parties over a 15-year period in post-...
Article
This article presents a new dataset of pledges made by Europarties during the 2004 and 2009 European Parliament elections, as well as pre-legislative priorities of the European Commission following these elections. The data cover two legislative cycles in the period 2004–2013. The article discusses the rationale behind the development of this datas...
Article
Full-text available
Why are some parties more likely than others to keep the promises they made during previous election campaigns? This study provides the first comparative analysis that addresses this question with common definitions of pledges and fulfillment. We study the fulfillment of 18,743 pledges made in 54 election campaigns in 12 countries. We find high lev...
Article
The literature on reform policy fulfillment after the collapse of Communism identifies mandate responsiveness as the weakest aspect of the quality of democracy in Eastern Europe. We build on this research and specify both direct and interaction effects of party promises and voter understanding on policy outcomes. On the empirical level, we develop...
Article
Center‐right parties in government in Romania and Bulgaria navigated the economic downturns associated with the Great Recession (2008‐12), and introduced austerity policies, yet had different electoral fates. While in Romania, the Democratic Liberal Party experienced a dramatic loss at the December 2012 elections, in Bulgaria, the Citizens for Euro...
Article
Full-text available
Focusing on Bulgaria, and covering the 1990–2009 period, this article analyses what factors predict if print media will report election promises made by political parties. The study utilizes two original datasets. One consists of 3083 pledges made by 15 parties ahead of seven elections. The second dataset includes news stories published by six news...
Article
In the last 18 months, voters in Bulgaria went to the polls three times—at two national and one European Parliament (EP) elections. The national legislative elections on October 5, 2014, sent eight parties/coalitions to the National Assembly, making it the most fragmented legislature in the country's post-Communist democratic history. Four formatio...
Article
Growing up in Bulgaria during the “transition” years, as a then fifteen-year old, I spent the summer of 1990 queuing up at the neighborhood newsstand waiting for the daily delivery of freshly printed newspapers. Shortages of goods, including food and gasoline, caused long lines in front of many stores, but the crowd waiting at the kiosk was eager t...
Article
This research focuses on the inquiries into alleged maladministration by EU institutions completed by the Office of the European Ombudsman (EO) during the period 1996–2012, seeking to highlight the ways in which the Ombudsman advances democracy in the European Union (EU). The article analyses the content of an original dataset consisting of 515 cri...
Article
Gardant à l’esprit la classification existante des régimes de protection sociale, ce document passe en revue les différentes typologies afin d’examiner les cinq politiques sociales - les prestations de vieillesse, de maladie et de maternité, d’accident du travail, de chômage, et les allocations familiales - réparties dans 30 pays européens. Ces pro...
Article
Full-text available
This study examines the nature of election promises made by political parties in Bulgaria during the 1997 and 2001 elections, and evaluates the factors that determine pledge fulfilment. The seven parties that took part in these elections made 792 pledges and fulfilled an average of 60% of them. A combination of institutional characteristics, i.e. s...
Article
Full-text available
Although election news framing is a burgeoning area of research, empirical studies of what factors influence frame building remain rare, especially in non-Western countries. This study investigates the use of the strategic game frame and the relationship between that frame and system-level and organizational-level factors. The analysis focuses on t...
Article
Full-text available
This study analyzes the role of media type, political institutions and type of news on the use of episodic, thematic, economic consequences, human interest and conflict frames when reporting economic news during seven elections in Bulgaria for the period 1990–2009. Analyzing 543 news stories from six newspapers, the authors find that thematic and e...
Article
Full-text available
Although the importance of news sources is widely acknowledged in journalism and political communication, few studies have examined source use in election news reporting in Bul-garia. Based on a content analysis of the two national dailies with the highest circulation, the present study demonstrates that domestic politicians vastly outnumber other...
Chapter
Full-text available
Among the most serious economic challenges facing the European Union are reduced labor productivity and budgetary difficulties sustaining the social welfare models due to aging and declining population in practically all member states. In an attempt to help address these challenges while maintaining and enhancing the competitiveness of the European...
Chapter
This essay explores the relationship between neo-liberal transformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and globalization in the region. It starts with an overview of the increasing level of globalization activities in the CEE countries. The first section of this essay also shows remarkable cross-country diversity among the CEE countries regard...
Article
Full-text available
The program-to-policy linkage refers to the level of congruence between what political parties promise during election campaigns, as set out in their election programs, and the policies delivered by governments after elections. The program-to-policy linkage is an important element of modern democratic theory. Moreover, institutionalist theories pre...

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