From nationalism to educational divide? Party positions and voters’ profiles on welfare state issues in Estonia and Latvia in the 2010s

Abstract

This paper studies electoral dynamics in Estonia and Latvia in the years 2011-2019 by juxtaposing political supply with political demand in the welfare state issue. The article contributes to the theory of two-dimensional policy space, which has been widely studied in the context of mature welfare states. We show, using Estonia and Latvia as examples, that this framework can be extended to explain electoral dynamics in contemporary post-communist Eastern Europe. Empirically, we found that despite the temporary prominence of the distributional divide, the socio-cultural dimension has preserved its dominance in political supply and demand. While distinctive voters' profiles are detectable in both countries, stable party constituencies are not formed behind those divisions and the strongest predictor that distinguishes voters is the level of education. Thus, the strong legacy of the socio-cultural cleavage in combination