Nostalgic Voting? Explaining the Electoral Support for the Political Left in Post-Soviet Moldova

Abstract

How does political nostalgia influence voting? Although nostalgic voters have been often mentioned as central to the rise of populism in the West, scholars have rarely shown empirically how nostalgia influences electoral choice. In this paper, I use survey data from 2009 and 2016 to investigate the extent and electoral impact of Soviet nostalgia in the context of democratizing Moldova. First, the paper reveals and explains why political nostalgia is distributed unevenly across Moldova’s territory with certain regions and ethnocultural groups embracing romanticized views of the Communist past more often than others. Second, the paper demonstrates that nostalgic orientations toward the past and cultural factors rather than perceptions of economic conditions structure party choice in post-Soviet Moldova. The paper also identifies the discursive similarities between varieties of Western populism, Euroscepticism, illiberal worldviews, and the nostalgic appeals of the Moldovan Left.