Sten Berglund

• South Stockholm University

Population surveys onEstonia, Latvia and Lithuania; follow-up studies to the New Baltic Barometer (1992-2004).

While much of this book is about mass attitudes, values and identities, Chap. 3 is also concerned with political behaviour: how and to what extent does political culture translate into support for various party alternatives? The first section is a reflection on the formation and configuration of parties and cleavages in the aftermath of the Soviet...

This chapter focuses on the strained and complex relationship between the Baltic states and Russia, not least in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea and the wider conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Much of the analysis centres on Latvia in particular—since the country was singled out for a special ‘post-Crimea’ survey. The spotlight is on public su...

This chapter is about nation building under exceptional circumstances. Covering four different but related topics, the inquiry begins by exploring the thickness of ethnic identity markers. Second, it focuses on language laws, citizenship legislation and naturalisation procedures, with an emphasis on non-citizens. Third, it revolves around conflict...

Chapter 4 presents an analysis of how Baltic people evaluate the performance of their respective political systems. The focus is thus on the evaluative dimension of political culture: do people get what they expect from their governments; and if not, what are the implications for system support and democratic stability in the region? It starts with...

The ‘return to Europe’ was on the Baltic agenda early on, and this chapter applies a longitudinal perspective. The surveys used in this book give us important information about the trajectories of the three Baltic countries during the formative years leading up to European Union (EU) accession and beyond. They include questions tapping attitudes to...

The book is the first systematic and comparative effort to capture political culture in the Baltic countries, including political orientation and support for democracy. Revolving around public opinion data from the 1990s and onwards, including two recent surveys commissioned by the authors, the book takes stock of the political climate prevailing i...

This article focuses on attitudes towards Russia in Bulgaria and Hungary — two EU and NATO countries with special relations to Russia — in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military intervention in support of separatists in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and onwards. We begin by putting the relations to Russia in a histori...

Feckless pluralism refers to political systems that fall short of democratic standards, but contain contested elections and alternation of power between different political groups. It is a form of government that is neither democratic nor autocratic. Hybrid regimes of this sort caught the attention of political scientists in the wake of the third w...

Much of the political science literature suggests that a cohesive political community is advantageous-if not a precondition-for a stable democracy. Forging a cohesive community is obviously a more complex matter in a multi-ethnic setting. This article will consider the prospects of building political communities in the Baltic countries-three countr...

This third edition of The Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe provides an authoritative and thorough analysis of the political changes, which have occurred in Central and Eastern Europe since the demise of communism. It offers an historical, comparative perspective of the region and focuses on the social consequences of the democratisati...

This article sets out to analyse recent regime developments in Ukraine in relation to semi-presidentialism. The article asks: to what extent and in what ways theoretical arguments against semi-presidentialism (premier-presidential and president-parliamentary systems) are relevant for understanding the changing directions of the Ukrainian regime sin...

What is a political cleavage, and what cleavage structures are relevant to European societies today? Drawing on empirical evidence from the political transformations in Central and Eastern Europe, the chapter seeks to enhance the academic discussion on cleavages in contemporary Europe. The chapter breaks down into three parts: an introductory secti...

The election to the Finnish Eduskunta which was held on 15–16 March 1987 may go down as something of a turning-point in Finnish postwar politics. It marked an end to the long-standing practice of excluding the Conservative Party from the list of potential government parties. Social Democratic Party leader Kalevi Sorsa elaborated on this topic in se...

The logit method for ecological inference, presented by Thomsen in 1987, estimates individual level voting behaviour from aggregate election results. Making comparisons with survey results, this article tests the validity of ecological estimates of voter mobility between parties at three Danish, five Swedish and three Finnish election periods. For...

This paper focuses on the floating vote and the floating voter at three critical junctures in modern Swedish political history: the general elections of 1928, 1948, and 1968. The topic is in the mainstream of electoral research, but with one important proviso: it is a study of floating without the benefit of survey data. The analysis is based on Th...

This thoroughly revised and updated edition of The Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe provides an authoritative and thorough analysis of the political changes which have occurred in Central and Eastern Europe since the demise of communism. It offers an historical, comparative perspective of the region and focuses on the social consequen...

Few events have drawn as much interest from the academic community as the breakdown of Soviet-style socialism in Central and Eastern Europe and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union itself in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This paper might be classified as yet another in a continuous flow of scientific contributions, inspired by the co...

The way in which the citizens of Western Europe are governed is no longer decided on a purely national level. This book is the second in the ‘Beliefs in government’ series, and systematically explores the attitudes of European publics to this internationalization of governance, and examines trends and sources of support for European integration. Ar...

The way in which the citizens of Western Europe are governed is no longer decided on a purely national level. This book is the second in the ‘Beliefs in government’ series, and systematically explores the attitudes of European publics to this internationalization of governance, and examines trends and sources of support for European integration. Ar...

This article addresses itself to the crisis of de- mocracy in inter-war Europe which saw the breakdown of one democratic regime after the other with Czechoslovakia as the only survivor case in Eastern and Central Europe by the end of this period. lt is cast within the framework of Stein Rokkan's seminal conceptual map of Europe which is expanded in...

The Stalinist and neo‐Stalinist system of government was imposed on Eastern Europe by the leading member of the Soviet bloc. It was a centralized and authoritarian system that was capable of transformation only within boundaries defined by the ruling communist parties. The revolution of 1989–90 was a byproduct of a permanent legitimacy crisis in Ea...

Party leaders rarely admit publicly to changing party policy in order to attract additional voters. It is a well-known fact, however, that pursuing a strategy of vote maximisation jeopardises the political parties’ ideological commitments.

Party leaders rarely admit publicly to changing party policy in order to attract additional voters. It is a well-known fact, however, that pursuing a strategy of vote maximisation jeopardises the political parties’ ideological commitments.

Political scientists have a long-standing interest in identifying regions which are defined in terms of political stability. That is also what we set out to do, and in the process we get to evaluate two alternative methods of regionalization which are based on different theoretical models. The two models are geared to the specific requirements of l...

A fifty-year period of tranquility in the Scandinavian party arena was broken in 1970 with the success of the Finnish Rural Party and the Swedish Center Party. Three years later, Denmark and Norway witnessed the break-through of heretofore unknown parties: the Progressive Party, the Center Democrats and the Norwegian Anders Lange's Party. Social De...