Origin, Ideology and Transformation of Political Parties

East-Central and Western Europe Compared

Vít Hloušek, Lubomír Kopecek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754678403
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317085027
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Two decades have passed since the transition to democracy began in Eastern Europe. Today, West and East-Central European countries share a common political space - the European Union. This has created a fascinating opportunity for analysis of the similarities and differences between these countries. Here, Vít Hloušek and Lubomír Kopecek critically apply the party-families approach to political parties in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. With chapters devoted to social democrats, greens, the far right and left amongst many others, this book charts the parties' origins, ideologies, and international ties alongside their Western European counterparts. By examining the political relevance of different party families, Hloušek and Kopecek are able to assess the validity of this typology in the analysis of the transformation of political parties in this region. Detailed analysis coupled with an innovative application of the party families approach, makes this essential reading for students of party politics.

Chapter 1 Types of Political Parties and Party Families

DOI: 10.4324/9781315599106-1

Political parties are classified in various ways. The most commonly-used distinctions are based on (1) organization and (2) ideology. Let us first look briefly at organization. In his classic 1954 overview of political parties, Maurice Duverger distinguished between cadre parties, sometimes called notables or elite parties, and mass parties, with other authors using the slightly differing terms (with slightly differing definitions) of mass bureaucratic parties (Panebianco 1988) or parties of social integration (Neumann 1956).

A cadre party is institutionally weak. Basically it is no more than the loose political platform of a group of leaders without a developed nation-wide organization and party apparatus; in its relation to voters it only becomes active before elections. A mass party, on the other hand, concentrates on building strong party institution with a large membership, a territorially-broad organizational structure, a functioning party apparatus, and the cultivation of long-term voter alignments. Cadre parties emerged on the political scene over the course of the 19th century, while mass parties appeared toward the end of the century. However, mass parties quickly became the more important type.

Duverger's survey was followed by Otto Kirchheimer (1966), who identified a newly-developing type of political party, which he labeled the catch-all party. This type of party is a reaction to changes that took place after the Second World War in Western European societies, especially the erosion of traditional social boundaries, the growth of social mobility and living standards, and the expansion of new means of communications (above all television). Some of the original mass parties improved their organizational flexibility and broadened or, perhaps more accurately, diluted their previous ideological positions in order to address the largest possible electoral audience. With these parties the membership base was much less important, while the role of leaders became vital in addressing voters. Kirchheimer's thesis was taken up later by other authors (for example Panebianco 1988; Katz – Mair 1995; general summarization of organization models Krouwel 2006).

However, the way political parties have developed in post-Communist East-Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 has shown that applying concepts and observations acquired through study of the Western European environment produces a number of problems, some of which will be taken up in the text below. A number of concepts have been developed specifically for East-Central and Eastern Europe, or universally applicable concepts taking East-Central and Eastern Europe into account. Of these, at least two merit some attention here. Herbert Kitschelt (1995: 449–451) divided parties in East-Central and Eastern Europe into three (ideal) types: charismatic, clientelistic, and programmatic. He looked mainly at what the voters’ ties to the parties were based on. Voters are drawn either to (1) the party candidates as personalities (charismatic parties), or (2) the expectation of personal or other material or non-material benefits (clientelistic parties), or (3) the hope of gaining indirect advantages in the form of the general collective good if the party wins the elections (programmatic parties). The charismatic parties did not build a classic internal organization, and for the most part represents an unstructured mass concentrated around a leader. The clientelistic parties do invest a certain amount of energy into building an organizational structure, but key to their organization is the nurturing of patron-client ties. This patronage-client network substitutes for the classic territorial structure. The programmatic parties are the only ones to have at their disposal a developed organizational structure and a more clearly-enunciated set of positions, offering their voters an intelligent choice among competing alternatives.

Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond (2001: 9–12) offered a more structured categorization consisting of 15 (!) types of parties. These authors tried to construct a universal categorization applicable for political parties on the European continent and outside it. In doing so they used traditional models, as well as various concepts adapted for East-Central and Eastern Europe, including Kitschelt's. They made use of three criteria: organization (parties with strong and weak institutional structure); attitude towards democracy and democratic regimes (“pluralistic” parties that are willing to permit discussion of opposing viewpoints as opposed to “hegemonic” parties that behave semi-loyally towards democracy, or completely anti-systemic parties with political visions that brook no alternative); and program or ideology (ideological or religious parties as opposed to pragmatic parties).¹

¹ On the basis of these criteria they posit the following types: elite parties in local notable or clientelistic variant; mass-based parties in pluralistic variants of class-mass, pluralist nationalist or denominational-mass parties or in non-pluralist variants of Leninist, ultranationalist and religious fundamentalist parties; ethnicity based parties divided into sub-types of ethnic or congress parties; electoralist parties – catch-all, programmatic, or personalistic; and finally movement/parties sub-divided into left-libertarian and post-industrial extreme right variants.

To simplify somewhat, we can say that both Kitschelt's as well as Diamond's and Gunther's conceptualizations work with organizational and ideological aspects in the broader sense, although each handle it in their own way. The advantage is that it enables a relatively comprehensive description of the typology of political parties. On the other hand it produces some complications, because it leads to mixing two aspects of analysis that are different in their character.

This book will favor the ideological and programmatic perspectives, and treat organizational aspects as secondary. Of course this approach, too, runs into several problems, as the above authors duly pointed out themselves. First, for some parties the ideological and program level may not be that important. They might behave pragmatically, and change their ideological armor as needed; or their identities may be chosen quite eclectically in order to encompass as much as possible of the current preferences of voters, which are relatively fluid. Secondly, things other than ideology may be more important to their success (leadership charisma, clientelist ties). Third, the life span of many parties especially in the East-Central Europe has been short, often limited to one or two elections. Thus their identity often does not have time to develop a consistent and readable form. Fourth and finally, the fact cannot be ignored that the ideological “weapons” of many parties in the East-Central European region have been different mainly in the 1990s from those traditionally found in the environment of Western Europe. Much of this is related to the complicated history of the region, which even before the era of communism exhibited a good deal of divergence from the Western European variant.

However, these objections by themselves do not disqualify the focus of the study, although it does require a certain adaptation of theory. On the contrary, it opens room for an interesting comparison of party politics between the countries of East-Central Europe and the Western models. The most serious problem in trying to classify parties is their seemingly limitless capacity for ideological pragmatism on the part of some of them. To what extent their proclamations represent a “real” identification with this or that ideological model, or are merely cynical declarations designed to prop up their political legitimacy, or a combination of the two, is a wide-open field for study. The concept of interpretation chosen here also attempts to judge how large a role is played by the ideology/program level in the actions of the individual parties, and which strategies have been important.

Categories of party families and problems of working with them in relation to post-Communist Europe

To analyze the identity of East-Central European parties we will make use of the concept of party families. As Peter Mair and Cas Mudde put it in their classic text on theory of party families in the Western democracies (1998: 212):

(adoption) of some notion of party family is the sine qua non of comparative party research, because it is only by identifying links and equivalences among parties in different polities that we can get a proper sense of what should and what should not be compared or of what is like and unlike.

Polish political scientist Andrzej Antoszewski (2005: 42–43) mentions four main reasons in favor of using this concept in studying political parties in East-Central and Eastern Europe:

• it is one of the most widespread concepts in political science,
• the ideological division into right and left has significance both for the party and for the voters. For the latter at least on the level of political symbolism, for it makes it easier to get their bearings on the political map,
• most parties identify themselves through certain ideologies that they identify with,
• the most important international party structures in which membership has become attractive for parties in the region, are groups of families linked by a shared legacy of values.

The reasons given by Antoszewski, though they may not apply 100% upon closer examination, still indicate some of the common parameters that define the party families.

But before we begin to look at these in more detail, it is necessary to briefly sketch out the genesis of the concept of party families within the theory of political parties. Unlike the parameter of political party organization, a more refined concept of party families is a relatively recent development. Most of the classic scholars of political parties from the second half of the 20th century, including Maurice Duverger and Giovanni Sartori, showed relatively little desire to delve deeply into issues of ideology and the programmes of political parties and have not created their own conceptions of party families. Obviously, both of the aforementioned authors have in some way implicitly worked with the concept of party families within the framework of their wider analytical and classificatory constructs. In connection with the number of parties in European countries, Duverger for instance differentiated these according to a political key which takes into account historical, cultural, social and territorial divisions within the societies and their various combinations. In France, for example, he finds three main divisions: “Clerical” versus “Anti-clerical”, “West” versus “East” and “Freedom” versus “Planning”. These divisions and their intersections influenced the shape of major political forces in the country (Duverger 1954: 231–232). Duverger's divisions were not intended as a universally applicable classification of parties according to their ideology; his aim was to explain the causes and character of the given country's multipartism. Similarly, the concept of ideological distance played a very important role in Sartori's work, notably in his operationalization of individual parties as independent and diverse political actors who compete with each other, and in observing whether a coalition between a given set of parties is possible or impossible (Sartori 1976: 125–127). But again, this conceptualization was only secondary to his main interest which had another purpose, that is, to develop a typology of party systems.

Even authors who have used ideological orientation to classify parties and have divided them into various groups according to ideology have avoided a deeper analysis. A typical example is the oft-reprinted handbook by Gordon Smith Politics in Western Europe (first printed in 1972–cf. Smith 1990: 122–123). At the conclusion of his description of parties and party systems, Smith undertakes a classification of political parties in the Western European countries into 11 types, from Communists on the far left, to the far right at the other end of the spectrum. For individual types he uses the term stream. However, Smith declines to give a more detailed explanation of his system of classification and the differences between individual party groups, even though it is clear that in his categorization he is implicitly working with the ideology and program of the parties.

Only at the end of the 20th century was there something of a “breakthrough”, and the separation of parties into party families has become a relatively well-developed theme. It came about somewhat paradoxically at a time when defining of the main ideological orientations had become somewhat more difficult, with the gradual disintegration of the traditional socio-political milieu, changes in the historical cleavages, erosion of the hard lines between segments of the electorate, and last but not least changes in the political orientation of many parties. Moreover, after the Second World War new ideologies began to appear (feminism, environmentalism, etc.) that had a major impact on some parties (Mair 1997and 2006; Dalton 2002; Dalton, McAllister and Wattenberg 2002; Poguntke 2005; Volkens and Klingemann 2005; Siavelis 2006).

A groundbreaking work on the concept of party families was Parties et familles politiques by Daniel Louis Seiler (1980), which made its widest mark in the Francophone social science environment. An even more influential work was the systematic overview by Klaus von Beyme from the early 1980s contained in the book Parteien in westlichen Demokratien (published in German in 1982; the English version cited in this book 1985). Beyme, on the basis of analysis of political parties in Western Europe, outlined ten party families, which he referred to as familles spirituelles. These parties were:

• liberal and radical,
• conservative,
• workers' (social democratic and socialist),
• regional and ethnic,
• agrarian,
• Christian democratic,
• communist,
• extreme right,
• ecological.

Beyme approached the construction of his categories in terms of development. He defined the individual families according to how they were formed historically, took into account the effect of cleavages identified by Stein Rokkan (center versus periphery, rural versus urban, etc.), and attempted to capture their changes over time.

He took special care to point out the impulses initiating their formation. Liberals defined themselves against the old pre-democratic regimes, workers’ parties against the bourgeois system, agrarian parties against the industrial revolution, regionalists against the centralism of the regimes at that time, etc. These issues shaped their political traditions and identities, and helped to form the common historical (genetic) origin of the individual families. Nevertheless, in constructing the party families Beyme placed greater emphasis on the common ideology definitions; that is, shared values, norms and basic principles of the parties’ programmes. From this he deduced their spiritual association giving the individual families a certain common ethos (Beyme 1985: in particular pp. 14–16). Some of Beyme's followers emphasise the spiritual dimension of party families even further and consider the ideology to be the belief system that goes right to the heart of a party's identity (Mair and Mudde 1998: 220).

Beyme himself at the beginning of the 1990s attempted to use his concept to describe the reality of the post-communist countries, adapting it pragmatically and eclectically to the dynamically changing conditions of East-Central and Eastern Europe. Beyme (1994: 297–312) categorized the post-communist parties as follows: movements/party fora, Christian democrats, liberals (liberal-conservative parties), social democrats, reform communists, ecologists, nationalists, ethnic and regional parties and functional groups. He explains that movement fora, or as Beyme also calls them Forumsparteien (party fora), represent special “umbrella” type political formations that grouped together the ideologically heterogeneous political currents that had emerged during the fall of the old communist regime and the creation of a new regime. Very soon the political differences within the elites of these formations came to the forefront, and contributed to their rapid disintegration soon after the first “founding” elections. The structure of these formations reflected their character as political movements in that they lacked a developed organization, and were strongly linked to the spontaneity of human masses. Representative examples of forum-type movements/parties were the Civic Forum in the Czech lands, the Hungarian Democ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Types of Political Parties and Party Families
• 2 Social Democrats and Socialists: Long Way of Adaptation and Peculiarities of Origins of East-Central European Parties
• 3 The Far Left: Family Diversity and Traditionalist Nostalgia in East- Central Europe
• 4 The Greens: Success in the West, “Fooling Around” in the East
• 5 The Agrarian Parties: Remembrance of Things Past
• 6 The Liberals; Or, the Curse of the Political Center
• 7 The Christian Democrats: Between Adaptation and a Struggle for Survival
• 8 The Conservatives: Between Tradition and Change
• 9 The Far Right: Between Tradition and Post-modernity
• 10 Ethnic and Regional Parties: Rise in the West, Remnants in the East
• 11 Party Families in East-Central and Western Europe at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Similarities and Divergences
• Bibliography
• Party Documents
• Index