Two Decades of Divergent Post-Communist Parliamentary Development

Abstract

Post-communist parliaments have become increasingly different from one another over their first two decades. This two decade review considers seven parliaments: four in Central Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia) and three in the former USSR (Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine). They have evolved over four dimensions of change: context of constitution and party system, rules and organisation, members, and civil society. At the end of the second decade, parliaments may be placed on two dimensions, of autonomy from the executive, and of party polarisation. Three background factors of transitions, legacies of communist era legislatures, and of international contacts are identified as sources of their divergent trends.

Keywords:

• post-communist legislatures
• parliamentary contexts
• legacies of communist legislatures
• parliament–executive relations
• parliamentary structure and rules

Acknowledgements

Gabriella Ilonszki would like to express her thanks to the TAMOP. 4.2.1/B-09/1/KMR research support scheme which made her contribution possible.

Notes

The ‘effective’ or equivalent number of parties is an index to measure the degree of concentration/dispersal of the party system, based upon both the number and relative size of parties (Taagepera and Shugart 1989, pp. 77–91). This index can also be inverted to form a party concentration index (Horowitz and Browne 2005, p. 691). It is not, however, a count of the number of parties which are effective – that is a very different question. It is genuinely difficult to wrap the fluid and varied phenomena of post-communist parties into statistical measures, as illustrated by the many critics of this specific measure, the different ways in which the index is measured, and by the different numbers reported in the literature (Linz and Stepan 1996, p. 278; Lewis 2000, pp. 87–88; Birch 2001, 2007, Brusis 2004, Millard 2004, Gel'man 2006, p. 546, Grzymała-Busse 2007, pp. 51–54, Mainwaring and Zoco 2007, p. 162). Some of the controversy arises from the fact that average figures or snapshots at one particular date cannot reflect changes during a term.

The initial events in each post-communist country are reviewed in the four-volume series by Dawisha and Parrott (1997) and in Kraatz and von Steinsdorff (2002).

The US House Democracy Assistance Program currently works with the post-communist parliaments of Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Mongolia and Ukraine (Price 2009).