Deciding in Difficult Democracies: Evidence from Presidential Elections in Eastern Europe

How do voters select candidates when democracy is at stake? Do they consider programmatic positions, valence issues, the opinion of transnational actors and experts, the candidates’ past, or their views on democracy? This project aims to explore the operating mechanisms of vote choice in presidential elections in problematic democracies. It disentangles the role of candidates’ policy positions, personal histories, approval by domestic and external political actors, as well as sociodemographic attributes. The project, based on a successful pilot study, conducts survey experiments on voters’ decision-making in Czechia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, with France as a comparison case.