created the maps. Josip Glaurdić is also grateful to the Leverhulme Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust (ECF-2012-399\7) which supported his work on this study.

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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Studies of popular attitudes toward European integration have paid limited attention to the historical roots of voters' security preferences. Using an original municipality-level data set, we test whether the pattern of voting in Croatia's 2012 referendum on European Union accession was affected by the legacy of the country's 1991-1995 war for independence or rather by economic factors. While finding evidence for the impact of the communities' level of prosperity and structure of economy, our analysis more notably demonstrates that the intensity of the communities' experience of war had a positive effect on their level of support for European Union membership. This effect also had a strong interactive relationship with the communities' political allegiances, highlighting the importance not only of historically rooted security issues but also of political actors who make those issues electorally salient.In these times of upheaval in Europe, it bears repeating that the European Union (EU) is not only an economic but also a security organization. Its foundations are firmly rooted in the geopolitical considerations of the early Cold War period. Its traditional and nontraditional security functions make it arguably the most

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.

Postwar Voters as Fiscal Liberals: Local Elections, Spending, and War Trauma in Contemporary Croatia This study exposes postwar voters' fiscal liberalism using individual-level and aggregate-level data covering a decade and a half of local electoral competition in postwar Croatia. Aggregate-level analysis shows Croatian voters' fiscal liberalism to be conditional on their communities' exposure to war violence: greater exposure to violence leads to greater support for fiscally expansionist incumbents. Individual-level analysis, on the other hand, shows postwar voters' fiscal liberalism as rooted in their different levels of war-related trauma: more feelings of war-related trauma lead to greater economic expectations from the government. Our analysis also shows that voters' warconditioned preferences for fiscally expansionist incumbents show little sign of abating over time-a testament to the challenge presented by postwar recovery, and to the impact war exerts on political life long after the bloodshed has ended. Public choice literature is divided when it comes to one important question: are voters fiscally liberal or fiscally conservative? In this study, we do not provide a comprehensive answer to this still unresolved puzzle which forms the foundation of a vast body of work in the political economy of voter choice. We do, however, offer a theoretically and empirically informed answer which we hold is valid in the context of postwar societies. We argue that individuals and communities exposed to war violence are fiscally liberal, as they seek economic security and fiscal activism from the government. Incumbents who provide that security, most notably in the form of fiscal expansion, get rewarded at the polls. In post-conflict contexts, this dynamic likely gets further compounded by the fact that war-affected communities also have greater needs for governmental intervention, with the challenges of reconstruction often out of reach of private initiatives. The consequences of this relationship between incumbents and voters in postwar polities could be toxic. In the environment of weak institutions and safeguards against corruption, a system which electorally rewards fiscal expansion could be particularly prone to clientelism. Postwar polities could be set down the path of political populism for years to come after the violence ends-a dynamic which has potentially dangerous repercussions not only for postwar economic recovery, but also for the health of postwar democracy. This article offers a step toward improving our understanding of the political economy of elections and voter choice in postwar societies through the study of four cycles of local electoral competition in Croatia, the EU member state with the most recent experience of war on its soil. The 1991-1995 Croatian war for independence may have had less media coverage compared with the war in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina, but it had a tremendously destructive impact on Croatian society. Direct war damages were estimated at $50-80 billion, with an additi...

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