Post-Communist EU Member States

Parties and Party Systems

Susanne Jungerstam-Mulders, Susanne Jungerstam-Mulders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351909709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Providing comprehensive insights into the parties and party systems of post-communist EU member states within the framework of each country's specific conditions and developments, this volume examines in particular the cases of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia. The book concentrates on three main themes: ideological cleavages between parties, party system competition, and party organization. Analytically competent and highly informative, it is suitable for courses on party systems and EU politics.

Chapter 1

Parties and Party Systems in Post-Communist EU Member States: Comparative Aspects

Susanne Jungerstam-Mulders

Introduction

Parties and elections form popular themes of research in political science and in particular in comparative political science. However, the lion’s share of contemporary party system research focusses on Western European party systems, while there is considerably less research into Central and Eastern Europe.¹ In fact, considering the richness of empirical data from elections in all of Europe, there is surprisingly little comparative work between the different regions of Europe. Instead, comparative research including East Central and Eastern Europe, including those post-communist countries that entered the European Union in May 2004, is usually conducted in the perspective of the democratization process in that region (cf. Pridham 2003).

In this book we focus on those post-communist countries that became new EU member states in 2004, namely the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Here, I occasionally use ‘new EU member states’ and ‘East Central and Eastern Europe’ parallel to the notion of post-communist EU member states. However, it must be noted that new EU-member states in 2004 also include Cyprus and Malta, though these have been disregarded because of their lack of a communist heritage, and their somewhat longer democratic and market-economy orientation. Moreover, in the literature it is not uncommon that East Central and Eastern Europe refer to a broader set of countries, including not only those former communist countries that we refer to here, but also to South East Europe with Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and – in addition to Slovenia – all countries formerly included in Yugoslavia. In addition, Eastern Europe usually includes those other European countries that received independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, except for Russia: Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.²

Here, the enlargement of the EU provides the logical starting point for comparative party research into former communist Europe, in part because the foundation of the enlargement is the postulate that all member states share some basic characteristics, including representative democracy, respect for human rights and more or less comparable living conditions. This ensures some degree of comparability. Moreover, those post-communist countries that were included in the EU enlargement in May 2004 have been regarded as more or less similar with regard to socioeconomic and political development and stability, first, with regard to each other and, second, with regard to the ‘old’ member states. Yet, considering the lack of comparative studies including all of the new East and East Central EU member states, as well as in-depth national case studies enlightening any comparative findings, these positions rest on a weak analytical basis. Therefore, the main intention of this book is to focus on the development of parties and the party systems in these countries. In doing so, this book compiles descriptive-analytical essays by experts on those new EU member states in focus, concentrating not only on nation specific features of parties and party system development, but also on three classical themes of party system research:

(1) ideologies and issues, mainly focussing on ideological cleavages, ideological dimensions and salient issues in present-day politics;

(2) party system competition including institutional aspects, such as the design of the electoral system, as well as central measurements of party competition in terms of electoral volatility, turnout and outcome in elections; and

(3) party organizations and the role of parties, including linkages between parties and the electorate, and between parties and the State.

Based on these common themes the concluding chapter of the book aims to discuss the nation specific case studies in comparative terms – in terms of differences and similarities, in patterns of consolidation and patterns of change. For the final analysis there are four questions posed:

(1) What are those nation specific circumstances that are particular to each of the countries’ parties and party systems?

(2) What characterizes the parties and party systems of the new post-communist EU member states with regard to their ideological spectrum, party organizations and electoral behaviour?

(3) What features do the parties and party systems in post-communist EU member states have in common and which features distinguish the one country from the other?

(4) What developments can we expect in these countries with regard to the parties and party systems in the near future in light of the experience of the past decade?

Before turning to the country cases, this chapter aims to provide a comparative view on the countries and the themes of discussion, mainly focussing on established operationalizations of comparative aspects of party system research. First, the intention is to include a number of system characteristics that are frequently addressed in the comparative literature as main features of the functioning of party systems, including the effective number of parties, ideological positions and dynamic structures of elections. The latter refer to electoral volatility and voter turnout. In addition, a discussion on party organizations and the linkage between parties and the electorate, including trust in parties, is included.

However, trust in parties, ideological positions and aggregate fragmentation, volatility and turnout in elections say little about the workings of the parties and the party system in real world politics. Nor do they provide explanations or an understanding of why differences or similarities occur. Instead, generalizations of the kind that comparative data, in the shape of fragmentation indexes and volatility indexes offer, enable generalizations which paint the bigger picture and pinpoint diverging experiences, and which are unlikely to be addressed in a single country case study. Subsequently, the country case studies that follow will shed light on the data that I am going to present here whilst discussing the themes in a more holistic approach to parties and party system development in a nation specific context.

Comparing Parties and Party Systems

Political parties play an intrinsic role in modern democracies characterized by free and fair elections. Hence, parties are the key players in most parliamentary elections that result in the compilation of assemblies of representation, i.e. parliaments. Therein, a second major function of political parties is the one of forming a basis for government formation, legislation and policy making. However, in fulfilling these functions, parties do not act as independent actors in a vacuum. Together with other parties they form the party system, which could also be described as ‘the patterned interaction of parties resulting from party competition’ (Mair 1990). As a consequence, any thorough investigation into party systems of the new EU member states needs to include a study of the two most important attributes of the party system: first, the total number of parties in the party system and, second, the ideological positions held by the parties interacting in that system. Apart from the fragmentation and the ideological position of parties in a party system, a systematic comparison of parties and party systems should also include other aspects, such as elections and the ‘dynamic structure’³ of their political systems, i.e. turnout and volatility.

Fragmentation of the Party System

There have been many efforts to categorise party systems, of which the categorization of Jean Blondel (1968) was the first effort to disintegrate the multi-party system category that had long been seen as the opposite of the more ‘superior’ two-party system. In doing so, Blondel distinguished between two- and two-and-a-half-party systems (the latter being dominated by three parties; two major parties and one that is considerably smaller), multi-party systems with a dominant party and multi-party systems without a dominant party. And even though this classification ‘did little more than improve the traditional two-party versus multiparty distinction by disaggregating the otherwise overloaded multiparty category’, Blondel’s effort took a party’s relative size into account (Mair 1997). This perception of a party’s ‘relative size’ has later been adapted by political science to a much greater extent, so that most political scientist, today, are quite familiar with notions such as the ‘effective number of parties’ and the ‘fragmentation’ of party systems.

The question of the number of parties is a problematic one, since counting the actual number of registered parties – or even the number of parties participating in national elections – may give a disproportionate picture of the relations in a party system. This problem may derive, for instance, from the presence of numerous, but mainly unsuccessful parties participating in elections. These parties may be quite irrelevant to the working of a democracy in view of their political importance and influence on policy formation. However, looking only at parties entering parliament may exclude q...