EXPLAINING PARTISAN LOYALTIES IN LITHUANIA
EXPLAINING PARTISAN LOYALTIES IN LITHUANIA

Summary/Abstract: This article aims at determining the level of partisan loyalty in Lithuania and exploring the differences between loyal and ‘floating’ voters. Three competing explana¬tions of the formation of party loyalties are examined in the paper: a social cleavages theory, a social learning model and a political trust model. In the first part of the paper, the theoretical framework of the analysis is introduced: the concepts of partisan loyalty, party identification and partisan attachment are discussed and the main hypotheses are presented. In the second part, partisan loyalties of the Lithuanian electorate are analyzed and problems of voting stability measurement are discussed. Finally, in the third part of the paper, the hypotheses explaining the stability of electorate, based on three theoretical models, are verified using the post-electoral survey data. The data analysis presented in the paper reveals that the Lithuanian “electoral market” is much more open than that of old democracies of Western Europe: the proportion of loyal voters is half as low as that of ‘floating voters’. The data confirm the hypothesis of a relation between political trust and partisan loyalty of Lithuanian electorate.

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