Straddling the East-West Divide: Party Organisation and Communist Legacies in East Central Europe

Abstract

Europe, three countries have been commonly viewed as most likely to succeed in transforming themselves from East European states into West European ones. Hungary, Poland and the Czech successor to the former Czechoslovakia have gone a long way since 1989 toward fulfilling the expectations that were laid upon them. Less commonly recognised is that legacies of communist rule continue to affect even these three countries in important ways. This article examines how political parties developed in East Central Europe during the first 8 years of post-communist rule.1 Its aim is to understand whether societies or political elites played the larger role in the early development of parties in the region. The aspect of party development considered is the creation of party organisations. Through study of the party organisations built in East Central Europe between 1990 and 1998,2 this article suggests that early post-communist party development was driven to an unusual degree by the energies and resources of political elites. While in some respects Hungarian, Polish and Czech party politics have come to look very West European, in other respects they continue to be affected by their countries' more than four decades of experience with communist rule. Parties in East Central Europe clearly resemble West European ones in their support for democratic rule. They also partially resemble West European ones in the ideologies they profess and in the issue positions they hold (Kitschelt, 1992 and 1995; Evans & Whitefield, 1993, 1995 and 1998; Kitschelt et al., 1999). According to this study, however, East Central European political parties differ markedly from West European ones in the types of organisations they have built. Among the most important sources of these East-West differences are some key legacies of communist rule.