Patterns of Party Structural Change in Central and Eastern Europe, 1990-2015 (original) (raw)
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Patterns of party change in Central and Eastern Europe, 1990–2015
Party Politics, 2016
While parties in many new democracies frequently split, merge, change labels, and make and break electoral alliances, comparative systematic research on how these changes are related to each other is limited. This study addresses this gap by conceptualizing change as a result of intra-party conflicts, conflicts in or consolidation of existing electoral alliances, and the formation of new alliances and mergers. We develop measures for each type of change using an original dataset that covers almost 800 party-electoral term dyads in 11 countries in Central and Eastern Europe in the period between 1990 and 2015. Our findings contradict the idea of party change as a uni-dimensional phenomenon. Instead we find that exits from existing electoral alliances, their consolidation through mergers, and the formation of new alliances and mergers are moderately related to each other, but not with intra-party splits. Our findings suggest that parties and their alliances structure political competi...
Mergers and splits: how party systems have changed in Central and Eastern Europe since 1990
2016
The party systems of Central and Eastern Europe are generally viewed as being less stable than those in Western Europe, with a greater level of volatility in terms of the parties that compete in successive elections. But how has this picture changed since 1990? Using a new dataset covering 11 countries, Raimondas Ibenskas and Allan Sikk outline some of the key factors that have underpinned splits and mergers between different parties within the region. The establishment of democratic regimes in Eastern Europe, Latin America, SouthEast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa over the last three decades has led to heated debates about the functioning of party democracy across these countries. In comparison to their Anglo-Saxon or continental Western European counterparts, political parties in most of these young democracies are less stable.
CLEAVAGES, PARTY STRATEGY AND PARTY SYSTEM CHANGE IN EUROPE EAST AND
Manuscript version of ar CLEAVAGES, PARTY STRATEGY AND PARTY SYSTEM CHANGE IN EUROPE EAST AND WEST”, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 3:3 (2002), 425-451 More than a decade after the collapse of communism in East Central Europe the question of party system consolidation and stability remains somewhat contentious. It is sometimes argued that these systems are more unstable than their western counterparts, because of the nature of the transitions, the instability of the parties or the volatility of the electorates in East Central Europe. However, analysed in a comparative politics perspective the party systems of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and even Slovakia reveal underlying patterns of stability. Developments since the 1997-98 round of elections in the region are perhaps better analysed in terms of party system change than as indications of continued instability. In what follows, the development of competitive politics in the region is analysed from a comparative politics perspective, building on the West European politics literature in general and Lipset & Rokkan's 'cleavage model' of party system development in particular. 1 This warrants reconsidering some of the assumptions in the West European politics literature in the light of the post-communist context, which in turn permits some tentative conclusions about party system stability and change in general. The political parties, and particularly party strategy, emerge as the central variable in this analysis. The following analysis takes Lipset & Rokkan's model of party system formation as a starting point, albeit more as a heuristic device than applied directly to post-communist East Central Europe. The first section therefore constitutes an effort to adapt the model for application beyond its core cases, reconsidering some of the explicit and implicit assumptions about institutional design, cleavages, voters, and parties in the light of the conditions of post-communism. The second section turns to party strategy, suggesting that post-communist parties have been free to adopt a range of party strategies, some more successful than others. The third section briefly addresses the development of systematic party competition in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, suggesting that a degree of party system stabilisation was evident by the 1997-98 elections in terms of patterns of party competition and government formation. The concluding section considers the implications for party system stability and change in Europe, both East and West.
Stepping in the same river twice: Stability amidst change in Eastern European party competition
European Journal of Political Research, 2016
Party competition in Eastern Europe faces a seeming paradox. On the one hand, research finds increased political volatility in these countries. On the other hand, some authors demonstrate inherent ideological stability in the region. This paper reconciles these two findings by suggesting that while political organizations come and go, the ideological structure of party competition in eastern European is strikingly steady. We do this first by developing a number of different measures of the dimensional structure of party competition. We demonstrate the measures' consistency across countries, as well as their relative stability within countries over time. Second, focusing on two cases-the Czech Republic and Latvia, we demonstrate that parties replicate a stable competition pattern. Our findings speak to current developments in eastern Europe, and have implications beyond the region. The conclusion that even volatile party systems can be underpinned by stable ideological oppositions points to two different types of party system structure: one related to parties as organizations, and one related to parties as expressions of political divides.
The nature of the party systems in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has puzzled many scholars. High instability of the party systems and their specifi c evolution makes the application of theoretical models designed predominately for Western European party politics problematic. The paper puts forward the argument that we should further elaborate and specify the models for a small N comparative party system analysis in CEE countries and to incorporate some region specifi c components into the framework. The essential dimensions included into proposed comparative framework are as follows: (1) the stability of the party system, (2) party system fragmentation, (3) parties' penetration into society, (4) the ideology and origins of the major parties, (5) the dominant cleavage constellations framing the party competition (6) the strength of the party organizations. The above-mentioned dimensions are expected to capture the most important aspects that make the diff erence between the party systems in general, and each dimension is complemented with the specifi c additional variables suitable for party system analysis in CEE in particular. The framework will be tested on the Baltic States, which party systems are often regarded to be very similar to each other. However, the analysis will demonstrate that based on the above-mentioned framework, very signifi cant and noteworthy diff erences will be revealed.
Party system change in EU countries: long-term instability and cleavage restructuring
The European Parliament Elections of 2019, 2019
This chapter deals with the analysis of party system change in Europe after the 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections. Our task is threefold. First, we explore the patterns of electoral instability in Europe at the 2019 EP elections and compare them across countries and over time. Second, we compare trends and variations in electoral instability between national and EP elections, following the expectations derived from the SecondOorder Election (SOE) theory (Reif and Schmitt 1980). Third, we aim to understand the underlying dimensions of competition and cleavage structures in the 28 European party systems. From an empirical viewpoint, our analysis is based on data taken from a recently published dataset on electoral volatility and its internal components in EP elections since 1979 (Emanuele et al. 2019).
Struggle over Dimensionality: Party Competition in Western and Eastern Europe
East European Politics and Societies, 2012
This article analyzes the impact of party strategies on the issue structure, and consequently the dimensional structure, of party systems across europe. Conceptualizing political competition in two dimensions (economic left-right and social traditionalism versus liberalism), the authors demonstrate that political parties in both eastern and Western europe contest the issue composition of political space. The authors argue that large, mainstream parties are invested in the dimensional status quo, preferring to compete on the primary dimension by emphasizing economic issues. Systematically disadvantaged niche parties, conversely, prefer to compete along a secondary dimension by stressing social issues. adopting such a strategy enables niche parties to divert voter attention and challenge the structure of conflict between the major partisan competitors. The authors test these propositions using the 2006 iteration of the Chapel Hill expert Surveys on Party Positions. Findings indicate that while the structure of political conflict in eastern versus Western europe could not be more different, the logic with which parties compete in their respective systems is the same. The authors conclude that political competition is primarily a struggle over dimensionality; it does not merely occur along issue dimensions but also over their content.
Candidate Turnover and Party System Change in Central and Eastern Europe
2015
All estimates of party system change rely on coding decisions regarding the categorization of parties as old or new. However, such dichotomous coding is insensitive to links between new parties and previously existing ones or extensive internal change in old parties. This paper looks at an important but so far understudied indicator of internal party change-the turnover of electoral candidates. Turnover is analysed in 55 elections in Central and Eastern Europe-a region with high levels of internal change in established parties and frequent new parties with links to established ones. We contrast the findings on electoral candidate turnover to volatility scores reported in previous studies. We also identify important cases of: (a) new parties that are only moderately novel, (b) old parties that underwent a significant internal change and (c) parties that were neither old nor new. The last category of partially novel parties pose most acute problems for the indices of party system change. * The research for this paper has been partly been funded by the EU's FP7 ANTICORRP project.