Parliamentarization as a Regionally Specific Way of Democratization in East Central Europe

Abstract

This essay argues that parliamentarization has been a regionally specific way of democratization in East Central Europe (ECE). Obviously, parliaments are less important in the presidential systems of Latin America or Eastern Europe (on the distinction between parliamentary and presidential systems, see recently Strom 2000). In my view, parliaments have played an even greater role in ECE democratizations than in the parliamentary democracies of Southern Europe (SE). Parliamentarization has a series of interrelated meanings in ECE. First, it means the creation of a parliamentary democracy as opposed to the presidential type of democracy, and this effort was the strongest and the most decisive in the early nineties. It led to an extreme form at the initial period of development that I have termed “over-parliamentarization” when parliament and parties became too dominant as if they were the only venue and exclusive actors in politics. As parliamentarization proceeds in its wider meaning — that is as extension of the parliamentary forms and rules of the game to all institutions — over-parliamentarization declines and finally disappears. Secondly, in the narrow sense it means a particular period of party development when after the first free elections parties go through institutionalization within and with the parliaments. Thirdly, in the broader sense it is the base of the substantive definition and general feature of parliamentarization, in which the parliaments are both a showcase and a workshop, i.e. the essential institutional framework for democratization as a whole — as this is the case everywhere in ECE. The analysts have noted the decline of parliaments in the West but in ECE during democratic transition an increasing role of parliaments could be observed.