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This article investigates the role of war experiences on voters and veterans’ party choices in postwar elections. The literature has looked at the relation between military experience and electoral behavior, and at the political consequences of war-related psychological distress, yet has never integrated the two. This article looks at the war experiences and specifically the development of war trauma on the likelihood of casting a vote for a nationalist party during a postwar election. Based on a 2003 survey of 1,000 Croatian voters, I find that veterans of Croatia’s war of independence are more likely to vote for nationalist parties. However, voters who showed signs of trauma were less likely to vote for these parties. In addition, veterans suffering from psychological trauma after the war were far less likely to vote for nationalist parties.

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How do voters in consolidating democracies see electoral integrity? How does election affect the change in perception of electoral integrity among these voters? What role does winning play in seeing an election as free and fair? Building on the theory of the winner-loser gap, we answer these questions using original two-wave panel surveys we conducted before and after three parliamentary elections in Southeast Europe in 2018 and 2020. The article focuses on changes of perception of electoral integrity as a function of satisfaction with the electoral results in contexts where the quality of elections has always been at the centre of political conflict. We specifically explore the socialization effect of elections in environments with notoriously low trust in political institutions and high electoral stakes. The article goes beyond the "sore loser" hypothesis and examines voters' both political preferences and personal characteristics potentially responsible for the change in perception of electoral integrity over the course of electoral cycle.

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Issue reframing occurs when parties, while addressing an issue, shift the frame toward other policy domains. The literature has found that party issue framing affects how voters think about issues, yet scholars remain largely in the dark as to when and how parties frame issues. The study at hand theorizes and investigates when and how parties reframe issues in their external communication. Drawing on novel Belgian data about parties’ official stances regarding a large number of policy issues combined with their verbal argumentation of why they took this exact position, we test a new theory about the drivers and mechanisms of issue reframing. We find that parties reframe issues in terms of policy domains that are both salient to the general public and that are salient to the party itself—meaning that it has a history of devoting attention to the policy domain and “owns” it.

Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis were characterized by a difficult trade-off: the stringency of the lockdowns decreased the spread of the virus, but amplified the damage to the economy. In this study, we analyze public attitude toward this trade-off using a survey-embedded experiment conducted with a quota sample of more than 7,000 respondents from Southeast Europe, collected in April and May 2020. The results show that public opinion generally favored saving lives even at a steep economic cost. However, the willingness to trade lives for the economy was greater when the heterogeneous health and economic consequences of lockdown policies for the young and the elderly were emphasized. Free-market views also make people more accepting of higher casualties, as do fears that the instituted measures will lead to a permanent expansion of government control over society.

wars are extreme events with profound social consequences. political science, however, has a limited grasp of their impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in their wake. that is partly the case due to a lack of conceptual clarity when it comes to capturing the effects of war with reliable data. this article systematises and evaluates the attempts at modelling the consequences of war in political science research which relies on quantitative methods. our discussion is organised around three levels of analysis: individual level of voters, institutional level of political parties, and the aggregate level of communities. we devote particular attention to modelling the legacies of the most recent wars in southeast europe, and we offer our view of which efforts have the best potential to help set the foundations of a promising research programme.