The purpose of this chapter is to present background information on the nine elections included in the four paired case studies, including which parties were in power leading up to the election, major issues that came up during the campaign, the most important parties contesting the election, and the election results. I also include references to works in which interested readers can find more information on each of these elections.

The chapter is included in the book for three reasons. First and foremost, I hope to familiarize those who are not well versed in the peculiarities of postcommunist electoral politics with some basic facts about each election in an effort to make the case studies more widely accessible. Second, I want to highlight why exactly I think it is interesting to consider these elections as substantively meaningful “pairs.” Finally, in a comparative study such as this one, it is impossible to do justice to the full panoply of issues at work in any one particular election, and I very consciously leave that task to others who are able to devote entire articles or even books to single-election analyses. Nevertheless, the danger is that in doing so we can lose sight of how interesting and important these elections were for the development of these countries in the postcommunist era. Thus, the final purpose of the chapter is to attempt to share with readers a bit of the richness of the electoral experiences that provide the data for my analyses.