Abstract
Although much has been written about the process of party system institutionalization in different regions, the reasons why some party systems institutionalize while others do not still remain a mystery. Seeking to fill this lacuna in the literature, and using a mixed-methods research approach, this article constitutes a first attempt to answer simultaneously the following three questions: (1) What specific factors help party systems to institutionalize (or not)? (2) What are the links (in terms of time and degree) as well as the causal mechanisms behind such relationships? and (3) how do they affect a particular party system? In order to do so, this article focuses on the study of party system development and institutionalization in 13 postcommunist democracies between 1990 and 2010. Methodologically, the article innovates in five respects. First, it continues the debate on the importance of “mixed methods” when trying to answer different research questions. Second, it adds to the as yet brief literature on the combination of process tracing and qualitative comparative analysis. Third, it constitutes the first attempt to date to use a most similar different outcome/most different same outcome procedure in order to reduce causal complexity before undertaking a crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis. Third, it also shows the merits of combining both congruence and process tracing in the same comparative study. Finally, it also develops a novel “bipolar comparative method” to explain the extent to which opposite outcomes are determined by reverse conditions and conflicting intervening causal forces.
Highlights
Much has been written about the process of party system institutionalization (PSI) in different regions: e.g. Latin America (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995), Africa (Lindberg, 2007), East Asia (Stockton, 2001), Southern Europe (Morlino, 1998) or Eastern Europe (Bielasiak, 2002), and its extreme significance for the consolidation and healthy quality of democracy (Mainwaring, 1999; Morlino, 1998); the reasons why some party systems institutionalize while others do not still remain a mystery
Studies trying to discover the sources of such systemic institutionalization tend to adopt either a quantitative (e.g. Roberts and Wibbels, 1999; Tavits, 2005) or a qualitative character (e.g. Johnson, 2002; Meleshevich, 2007) and, face the following dilemma: either they identify a certain number of conditions affecting PSI in general, without specifying if they all apply to the different countries included in the analysis in the same manner, or they exclude from scratch certain conditions and focus on the causal chain connecting certain “preconceived” factors with the outcome in a limited number of cases
Since Mainwaring and Scully (1995) trumpeted the important consequences PSI may have for the consolidation of democracy in post-transitional countries, much has been written about the level of institutionalization in new party systems
Summary
An overview of the level of PSI between 1990 and 2010 in 13 Eastern European democracies is displayed in the figure above. While the last two pop up in all three analyses (i.e. MDSO+, MDSO- and MSDO), the first two reach a high level of significance in both MDSO+ and MSDO analyses All in all, these four conditions appear up to five times (WEALTH) or more (PCON, CCUM and PFUND), in contrast to other less relevant (just twice), and sometimes contradictory (see pair Serbia vs Ukraine in table A8) factors: namely, PI and POLAR.. These four conditions appear up to five times (WEALTH) or more (PCON, CCUM and PFUND), in contrast to other less relevant (just twice), and sometimes contradictory (see pair Serbia vs Ukraine in table A8) factors: namely, PI and POLAR.18 All in all, it is only after reducing the number of possible explanatory factors by more than three quarters that a methodologically manageable, and certainly less complex, analysis of the “causal link/s” between those four conditions and the outcome (and/or the lack of it) can be undertaken. For the importance of analysing negative cases, even if not deviant, see Mikkelsen (in this special issue). The so-called “New Economic Mechanism”, which liberalized foreign trade and enabled the limited introduction of small businesses in a still state-controlled market, was introduced by János Kádár in 1966
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