For whom the Bell Tolls : Grievance Theory and the Rise of New Political Parties in the 2010 and 2013 Czech Parliamentary Elections
Abstract
For whom the Bell Tolls: Grievance Theory and the Rise of New Political Parties in the 2010 and 2013 Czech Parliamentary Elections. This article presents an analysis of the electoral success of new political parties in the 2010 and 2013 Czech parliamentary elections.
The article uses the grievance theory for explaining the reasons behind inter-regional variation of electoral support for the Public Affairs Party, ANO 2011, and the Dawn of Direct Democracy of Tomio Okamura. We use two grievance mobilization models which focus on economic changes and immigration/ethnic conflict.
The study discusses grievance mobilization models and tests them on aggregate regional data using linear regression analysis. Overall, the study finds that the explanatory capacity of grievance theory mobilization models is very low.
This is especially the case of economic grievances, but even ethnic mobilization models were only moderately successful. While neither model performed well when controlling for education and age structure, the models including contextual variables had the best explanatory ability.
As the total amount of variance explained by the regression models was very low, future research should search for other factors explaining the reasons for the rise of the new parties. The theoretical model of grievance mobilization should be applied on individual data from surveys that are able to account more adequately for existing grievances in society, including political grievances, which are very difficult to observe at the aggregate level of analysis.