Parties, regime and cleavages: explaining party system institutionalisation in East Central Europe

Abstract

Party system institutionalisation has traditionally been viewed as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the healthy functioning of democracy; yet the question of why some of these competitive party systems managed to institutionalise at the end of the second decade of party politics while others have not has not received the necessary attention. In order to begin to fill this gap, this article tackles the above-cited issue by trying to discover what have been the ‘causal mechanisms’ explaining the different levels of institutionalisation observed in East Central European party systems. In order to do so, and contrary to the predominant literature, it constitutes a serious attempt to bring together both institutional and sociological approaches.

Keywords:

• Central Europe
• elections
• political parties
• post-communism

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Florian Grotz (ZDEMO, Leuphana University), Zsolt Enyedi and Dorothee Bohle (Central European University), Kevin Deegan-Krause (Wayne State University), Max Bader (University of Munich), Tim Haughton (University of Birmingham), Peter Učeň (International Republican Institute), Wade Jacoby (Brigham Young University), Peter Mair, and Carolien van Ham (European University Institute) for their useful comments on earlier versions of this work.

Notes

Horowitz and Browne (2005), Tavits (2005), and Mainwaring and Zoco (2007) are clear exceptions.

For previous applications of Mair's framework in a similar context, see Casal Bértoa and Mair (2012), Müller-Rommel (2005), O'Dwyer (2006), Rybář (2004), and Toole (2000).

For distinguishing between cabinets, I consider new governments to be only those which include a change in the partisan composition of the cabinet and/or those immediately constituted after new elections have been held (Casal Bértoa and Enyedi 2010, pp. 13–14).

Building on Sikk (2005, p. 399), old governing parties are considered to be all parties which have already been a constituent part of a previous government, both under similar and under different names (but not structure).

It should also be borne in mind that from 1992 until 1998, the extreme right-wing SPR-RSČ was also repeatedly excluded from participating in office, despite having more seats than the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA), a permanent member of the governing coalition until 1998.

Interestingly enough, government alternations occurring immediately after elections have had a ‘mixed’ character.

German minority (MN) excluded.

While East Central European party systems have become more institutionalised over time in general, after the last parliamentary elections – with the exception of Poland – this trend has been reversed (see Figure 3 below). I am thankful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this particular suggestion.

It is important to note here, however, that for the sake of simplicity, but also due to space reasons, this article focuses only on variables with a ‘proximate’ impact on the dependent variable. This is not to deny, however, that some of the excluded variables might have an indirect impact on party system institutionalisation. Indeed, as explained in detail elsewhere, the parliamentary fragmentation in East Central Europe is a function of the electoral system itself (Casal Bértoa 2011, pp. 178–194), rather than of the cleavage structure (Casal Bértoa forthcoming).

If a party does not have a stable core of voters, it will be free to move along the political spectrum in order to find electoral support. As a consequence, both citizens and politicians will have trouble when trying to locate the party as well as identifying what it represents. This will render any kind of stable cooperation extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Average party age has been widely regarded by scholars as the most important measure of an organisation (Janda 1980, Dix 1992, Jin 1995, Roberts and Wibbels 1999), with old parties considered to be more organisationally institutionalised than new ones.

Coalitions (or mergers) of pre-existing parties (e.g. SDK, UW, LiD, or AWS) are not considered here.

With the exception of Smer and ZRS, all took place after the year 2000.

Similar differences can also be observed using other indicators of party institutionalisation such as party switching (Bakke and Sitter 2005b), party nationalisation (Boschler 2010), and organisational systemness (Jungerstam-Mulders 2006).

The overall correlation (n = 25) between the ENPP and iPSI is −0.707 (significant at the 0.01 level).

This percentage increases to 82.4 when the first ‘founding’ elections are left out since institutionalisation (i.e. behavioural predictability) is also a matter of time.

In fact, up to 2010, all the Slovak and Polish cabinets formed after legislative elections contained at least one ‘new’ party (two in the case of Slovakia in 1998 and 2010 as well as Poland in 1993).

According to Elgie (1999, p. 13), semi-presidential regimes are characterised by the presence of ‘both a popularly elected fixed-term president and a prime minister and a cabinet responsible to the legislature’.

The logic is that the most recent electoral legitimacy of the president provides him/her with additional political leverage in the process of government formation, even in the case when his/her formal powers are severely restricted (e.g. Bulgaria or Ireland).

In September 2001, needing a coalition partner in order to secure a governing majority in the Sejm, the SLD considered a coalition with the populist-agrarian party Self-Defence led by Andrzej Lepper, although it was finally rejected in favour of SLD's old coalition partner instead: the agrarian PSL. Previously, other extreme political forces such as KPN and ROP had suffered the same fate.

Slovakia, parliamentary until 1999, constitutes a real ‘natural experiment’.

It should not be forgotten that the 1998/1999 anti-Mečiar coalition comprised the conservative SDK, the socialist SDL, the ethnic SMK, and the populist SOP.

While the cleavage takes the form of the classic centre vs. periphery (Rybář 2006) in Slovakia, it is characterised by religiosity and communist ‘nostalgia’ in Poland (Szczerbiak 2006, Jasiewicz 2007).

The only exceptions were the AWS (2000–2001) and PiS (2005–2006) minority governments, which required the parliamentary support of political forces from different ideological fields (ROP in 2000 or Samoobrona and LPR in 2005).