Exit, choice and legacy: explaining the patterns of party politics in post-communist Slovakia

Abstract

In the first two post-communist decades, party politics in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) displayed a remarkable degree of variation. Some party systems were stable, others were unstable, and others such as Slovakia showed stability in their instability. Although many of the widely used frameworks for explaining the development of party politics in CEE including legacy-based approaches, those stressing the exit from communism, institutional frameworks, the impact of the European Union, and accounts based on cleavages all have their merits, they fall short of a fully satisfactory explanation. An analysis of patterns of party politics in Slovakia not only highlights both the importance of the politics of independence and the (lack of) strategic crafting on the part of party leaders, but also underlines the need to examine the fate of individual parties. Central to party durability are organisation, leadership, and being a standard bearer on a major issue divide of programmatic competition.

Keywords:

• party politics
• Slovakia
• legacies
• European Union
• corruption

Acknowledgements

This article was partly written during a fellowship in the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. Financial support accorded by the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also extended to Rebecca Chamberlain-Creanga, Sharon Fisher, Jana Grittersová, Henry Hale, Seán Hanley, Markus Kreuzer, Serhiy Kudelia, Mitchell Orenstein, Robert Orttung, John Scherpereel, Marek Rybář, Sharon Wolchik and other participants at the George Washington University's Postcommunist Politics Social Science Workshop, the 2012 MPSA Conference, the Johns Hopkins University's SAIS Central European Spring seminar series in April 2012, and audiences at Université Libre de Bruxelles in April 2011, University College London in October 2012 and the 2013 CES Conference in Amsterdam for helpful comments on various iterations. I also extend my thanks to the reviewers of this journal for their constructive criticism. I am particularly appreciative of the input of my frequent co-author Kevin Deegan-Krause for a series of fruitful discussions which has fed into this article and for help in rendering the arguments and data in graphic form.

Notes on contributor

Tim Haughton is Reader (Associate Professor) in European Politics at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Constraints and Opportunities of Leadership in Post-Communist Europe (2005), the editor of Political Parties in Central and Eastern Europe: Does EU Membership Matter? (2011) and is the joint-editor of the Journal of Common Market Studies’ Annual Review of the European Union.

Notes

1. I appreciate the reviewer's comments that a family tree should be vertical rather than horizontal, but I would maintain the latter is the better way to visualise the development.

2. CEE is taken here to mean the 10 states from the region that joined the EU in 2004–2007.

3. To be fair to Grzymała-Busse, in her 2002 book she largely sets out to explain the electoral success and return to power of the former Communists in the first post-communist decade.

4. Plus also greens and a small social democratic party.

5. Accession negotiations were concluded at the Copenhagen summit in December 2002 after that year's September parliamentary elections, but the vast majority of the negotiations were conducted during the lifetime of the 1998–2002 government.