Political Parties in New Democracies: Party Organization in Southern and East-Central Europe by Ingrid s> van Biezen (review)

Abstract

386 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 is not quite a history.What is missingfor this revieweris the pain of historical change, which reaches bitterly into the present. Even so staid a paper as the Helsingin Sanomat reflects, in its correspondence column and sometimes in its editorials, this pain. It is the pain of people living year in, year out in temporary and often part-time jobs and being in consequence no longer creditworthy, paying rents that are far too high for them and with little prospect of gaining, let alone maintaining, a loan for a place of theirown. It is the ever-present threat of the lay-off (yes, its starting again) for many other individualsof diverseskills,including graduates.It is the clamour of the Metal Workers'Union for state help for branches of industrythat might otherwise be in danger of being transferredelsewhere. In the meantime, the tax-cutting mania is affectingallpoliticalpartiesin line with the neo-liberalistichope that if you cut taxes deeply enough the economy will grow and with it, automatically,an adequate enough taxbase, too. What is adequate? The authors are aware of the most strikingmanifestation of the lesions in the Finnish economy, the persistence and threatening rise of structural unemployment. And they are acquaintedwith the volume, publishedin 200 I, by the Academy of Finlandand entitledDownfrom theHeavens, upfrom the Ashes, in which the welfare state, for all its wear and tear, is still seen as the safetynet . Long may it so remain. But chapter six of the Academy's reportbreathes a spiritof 'powerlessnessand inability'to find alternativesto the strainsof the present. What this means is thatthe losersin society,whetherstrugglingalong or pensioned-off, do have a case. Leaving aside the human interest (thereis always the welfare state for them), the losers are indicating a failure, a set of failures,in much of the restof the Finnishinfra-structure. At the beginning of the text, the authors, going back to the economic crisis of the early i990s, averthat 'irreversiblechanges'have consequentlyoccurred. Afterreading thisbook, I would stillliketo help to reversethem and as a start I would liketo pay more taxes. Mari Rantanen and Markus Itkonen are to be congratulated for their beautifulcover design of the stimulatingbook entitledDynamic Finland. University ofTurku GEORGE MAUDE Finland van Biezen, Ingrid. PoliticalPartiesin New Democracies: PartyOrganization in Southern andEast-Central Europe.Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, and New York, 2003. xv + 255 pp. Tables. Notes. List of Party Acronyms. Bibliography.Index. C50.??. POLITICAL parties matter. They are integral to the functioning of modern democracies, both in their establishedand newly formedvarieties. In Political Partiesin New Democracies Ingrid van Biezen examines party formation and organizational development in four thirdwavedemocracies: Spain, Portugal, Hungary and the Czech Republic. After two opening chapters exploring comparative analyticalframeworks,the book examines each of the four case studiesin turnbeforedrawingthe threadstogetherin threechaptersdedicated to identifyingcross-nationalpatterns. REVIEWS 387 The chaptersdevoted to Hungary and the Czech Republic arepackedwith a cornucopia of interestingdata and analysis.Van Biezen, for example, charts the organizational development of the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP) showing how the Communist-successorparty attempted not only to distance itself from Communist ideology, but also to aim at a radical break in its organization through such mechanisms as decentralization and promoting the establishmentof differentinternalfactionsand platforms.MSzP, however, was not immune from the prevailing tendency in Hungarian party organization of an increasinglystrongparty executive. Emblematic of this change was FIDESZ's transmogrificationfromits initialloosely organizedform. Political Parties inNewDemocracies containsinterestingstatisticsdemonstrating the decline in political party membership in the Czech Republic despite the requirements of membership for many parties being little more than supporting the party's programme and paying one's membership fee. Lowlevel membership has had a knock-on effect in terms of the number of candidates running for public office. In the I998 local elections, for instance, politicalpartieswith parliamentaryrepresentationfieldedjust 25.7 per cent of the candidates. Central to van Biezen's book is her desire to discern where power lies in parties in new democracies. Her initial hypothesis suggests that we would expect the partyin public office (asopposed to the extra-parliamentaryparty) to be particularlyascendant because the parties are newly created, acquiring parliamentaryrepresentation at a very early stage of their development; but also thanks to their institutional rather than societal origins; and in part a...