Two Step Forward , One Steps Back : Electoral Coordination in the Hungarian Elections of 1998

Electoral coordination refers to the use by political parties of a concerted strategy that makes most effective use of electoral rules to maximize their interests in legislative elections. Coordination requires both strategic thinking and political discipline, however, and in relatively new democracies these conditions may not exist. In this study I examine electoral coordination in the Hungarian legislative elections of 1998, the country’s third since its transition to democracy in 1989. Not only was there extensive electoral coordination among political parties aware of the strategic incentives presented by the complex electoral rules, but voters also responded to the cues signaled by party leaders, leading to the general success of the strategy. Coordination took two forms: joint party sponsorship of candidacies and the strategic withdrawal of candidates between the second and first rounds of voting in the single member districts, known in Hungarian as “stepping back.” Careful selection and control of candidacies explains the bizarre aggregate result of that election, when the MSZP with the most total votes in each of three separate rounds of voting received only the second most seats. In addition, despite the expectation that contamination effects of its mixed-member system’s PR component would produce and sustain multipartism, Hungary’s party system has been steadily converging towards a two parties. Strategic coordination explains these outcomes as parties and voters employed the stepping back strategy to consolidate their forces around two poles.